Chapter 4 - The Fire on Canal StreetThe industrial district along the South Side of Chicago was a graveyard of rusted steel warehouses, abandoned rail yards, and dark, rain-swept alleys.
At 3:30 AM, twenty black armored vehicles belonging to the Valente syndicate moved through the fog like a silent, predatory fleet, completely surrounding the sprawling concrete warehouse on 47th and Canal.
This was Lorenzo Moretti’s primary distribution hub—a fortress holding forty million dollars in illegal contraband, private security detail, and the hit squad that had rammed Clara's vehicle four hours ago.
I stood on the roof of a three-story commercial building across the street, wearing a long black leather trench coat, holding a heavy tactical rifle, watching the warehouse through an infrared scope.
Beside me stood Mateo. "All units are in position, Dom. The perimeter is sealed. Lorenzo is inside with eighteen armed guards."
"Do not breach the building," I commanded, my voice flat and absolute.
Mateo frowned, turning his head. "Boss? We have fifty men ready to tear that place apart."
"Lorenzo wants a war, Mateo," I replied softly, lowering my scope, looking at the dark warehouse below. "He wants to fight in the streets, call the press, and use the chaos to escape to Canada. I am not going to give him a fight. I am going to erase him."
I pulled a small detonator remote from my coat pocket.
Ten minutes before our convoy arrived, my specialized demolition team had quietly breached the gas pipelines running along the basement foundation of the warehouse, flooding the lower levels with three thousand cubic feet of pressurized natural gas.
I looked down at the detonator in my palm, then reached into my pocket, pulling out a small, framed photograph of Clara that I kept in my wallet—a picture of her smiling on a sunlit beach in Amalfi three years ago.
"This is for Clara," I whispered to the dark night air.
I pressed the red button.
BOOM!
A blinding, catastrophic wall of golden fire exploded from the foundation of the warehouse, lifting the entire steel roof twenty feet into the air before the concrete walls collapsed inward like a house of cards. The shockwave rattled the windows of buildings three blocks away, showering the dark alleyways in a rain of sparks, ash, and burning debris.
The eighteen men inside, including Lorenzo Moretti, didn't even have time to draw their weapons. The entire hub was incinerated into an inferno within four seconds.
I stood on the roof, watching the flames roar against the dark, rainy Chicago sky, feeling zero satisfaction, zero victory, and zero peace.
May you like
Destroying an enemy was easy. Burning a building to the ground took a press of a button. But as I turned my back on the fire and walked toward the rooftop stairs, I knew that the hardest battle of my life was still waiting for me on the fourth floor of Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
"Back to the ICU," I told Mateo cleanly.
Related Stories
