Chapter 39 - The Breaking of the Cage
The explosion threw me backward across the steel decking, the heat scorching my face and singing the ends of my hair.
Automatic gunfire ripped through the roaring curtain of black smoke and orange flame, bullets ricocheting wildly off the steel bulkheads with terrifying, metallic screams. But the guards were shooting blind; the pressurized diesel had coated the floor between us, turning the entire midsection of the hold into an inferno.
Through the shimmering heat haze, I saw Carlo scrambling toward the emergency exit stairs, his expensive cashmere coat smoking at the hem, completely abandoning his guards and the prisoners.
"Mia!" I screamed, pulling myself up from the slick deck plates.
The fire was spreading with monstrous speed, fed by the continuous spray from the fractured manifold. The air was turning into a suffocating soup of black carbon and toxic fumes.
I sprinted around the perimeter of the cargo crates, avoiding the burning slick in the center, and reached the pillars where Vittoria and Mia were bound.
"Sarah!" Mia coughed violently, her small hands reaching toward me through the smoke.
I dropped Dante's gun, pulled a heavy utility knife from the waistband of my jeans, and slashed through the nylon ropes binding the girl’s wrists. The moment she was free, Mia threw herself around my neck, sobbing, her small body trembling with pure terror.
"Hold onto me, Mia," I choked out, coughing against the thickening smoke. "Don't let go, no matter what you hear."
I turned to Vittoria. Her hands were secured with heavy steel handcuffs around an iron stanchion—the kind of locks a utility knife couldn't touch.
"The key is in Carlo's pocket," Vittoria coughed, her face blackened by soot, her eyes streaming tears. "Sarah, you can't break these! Take Mia and get off the ship! The diesel is running into the lower bilge—the whole engine room is going to blow in five minutes!"
"I am not leaving you twice, Vittoria," I snarled, my voice cracking with rage and smoke.
I grabbed the heavy nine-millimeter from the deck. I jammed the muzzle directly against the chain linking the two cuffs, turned my face away, and pulled the trigger.
The blast was deafening in the enclosed space. The copper-jacketed round shattered the middle link into jagged shards, the impact wrenching Vittoria’s arms, but the chain snapped. She fell to her knees, free.
"The gangway is blocked," Vittoria gasped, clutching her bleeding wrists as she struggled to her feet. "Carlo’s men will be covering the main deck. There's a maintenance hatch near the rudder assembly—it drops straight into the slip between the pilings."
"Can you swim?" I shouted over the growing roar of the fire.
"I can survive," Vittoria said, her eyes meeting mine with the same unyielding steel that had kept her alive through six years of hiding. She grabbed Mia’s left hand, while I held her right. "Together, Sarah. On three."
We didn't make it to three.
From the smoke behind us, a figure materialized like a demon stepping out of the fire.
It was Carlo’s lead bodyguard—the man who had taken my three chest shots on the pier. He had survived because of his heavy ceramic body armor, but his face was half-burned, his tactical vest scorched black. He was holding a heavy combat shotgun, leveling the wide bore directly at Vittoria’s chest.
"Move," he growled, blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. "And I paint the bulkhead with both of you."
I tried to raise the pistol, but the slide had locked back.
Empty. Fourteen rounds gone.
Mia screamed, burying her face into my hip. Vittoria stepped forward, putting herself between the shotgun and her daughter, her bare, bleeding hands raised.
"Shoot me, you bastard," Vittoria spat. "Let the child go."
The guard’s finger tightened on the trigger.
Then, from the darkness of the overhead crane catwalk twenty feet above, a massive, black-coated shape dropped from the rafters like an falling anvil.
Dante.
He landed directly onto the guard’s shoulders, the sheer kinetic force of his two-hundred-and-forty-pound frame driving the man face-first into the steel deck plates with a sickening crunch of bone. The shotgun clattered away into the burning fuel slick, discharging harmlessly into the ceiling.
Dante didn't use a weapon. He had lost his gun, his coat was shredded, his bare arms covered in burns and third-degree scrapes, but the look in his eyes was something beyond human. He grabbed the guard by the tactical vest, lifted him six inches off the deck, and slammed him against the steel pillar with enough force to dent the iron.
The guard went completely limp, sliding down into the soot like an empty suit of clothes.
Dante turned slowly, his chest heaving, blood dripping from a deep gash over his right eye.
He looked at Vittoria.
Vittoria looked back at him.
For five seconds, the roaring fire, the screeching metal, the imminent destruction of the ship ceased to exist. Six years of silence, six years of hunting, of betrayal, of hatred, and of unresolved, agonizing love hung between them, suspended in the black smoke of Hell's Kitchen.
"Dante," Vittoria whispered.
Dante’s jaw trembled. A single, ragged breath tore from his throat.
"You took my daughter," he said, his voice cracking into pieces.
"I saved her," Vittoria replied, her voice breaking. "From your family, Dante. From Carlo."
A massive shudder shook the hull of *The Northern Star* as the fuel fire finally breached the lower engine compartment. A deafening metallic groan echoed from the keel, and the ship tilted violently five degrees to the port side, water beginning to cascade into the forward vents.
"Talk later," I screamed, grabbing Dante’s arm with everything I had. "The ship is sinking!"
Dante looked down at Mia. The little girl reached out, her small, soot-stained hands catching the sleeve of his torn coat.
"Daddy," she cried.
May you like
That single word shattered whatever monster was left inside Dante Castiglione. He scooped Mia into his massive arms, tucking her head under his chin, and looked at Vittoria and me.
"The stern hatch," Dante ordered, his voice hard as iron once more. "Move!"
