Chapter 18 - Blood at the Boathouse
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The blast from the lakefront boathouse shattered the back conservatory glass and tripped the estate’s main electrical transformer, plunging the hallways into red emergency lighting.
"The lake tunnel!" Marco roared, raising his assault rifle as automatic gunfire erupted across the back lawn. "Don Rossi didn't come by road—he sent two high-speed strike boats across the reservoir to breach the boathouse cellar! Lock the main house doors! Get Mrs. Castellano and the baby into the upstairs vault—NOW!"
Tessa didn't waste a single second screaming.
Sprinting up the grand staircase two steps at a time while bullets chewed into the heavy mahogany back doors of the ground floor, she burst into the second-floor nursery. She snatched baby Leo out of his crib, strapped him securely against her chest inside the padded Kevlar-lined infant carrier Dante had kept in the master closet, and grabbed the loaded Glock 43 and two spare magazines from the nightstand safe.
When she stepped back out into the second-floor gallery to reach the steel panic room located at the end of the master study hall, the heavy fire door at the top of the rear servants' stairwell blew off its hinges in a cloud of gray smoke.
Three men wearing tactical black body armor and carrying suppressed carbines stepped out onto the carpet, cutting her off from the panic room door—and walking right behind them, wearing a bulletproof vest over a dark three-piece suit with a silver Desert Eagle in his hand, was Special Agent Richard Vance alongside Don Salvatore Rossi of Brooklyn himself.
Down on the first-floor stairs behind Tessa, Marco and the remaining estate guards were pinned down by heavy machine-gun fire from the foyer, unable to reach the second floor.
"Hold your fire!" Don Rossi barked in a gravelly voice, raising his hand so his gunmen didn't shoot toward the infant carrier strapped to Tessa’s chest. The sixty-five-year-old Brooklyn boss looked at Tessa with cold, bloodshot eyes—eyes identical to his dead daughter Sofia’s. "Shoot the woman in the legs if she moves, but I want Dante’s brat alive! He sent my little girl back to me in a pine box this morning—he’s going to watch me raise his son as a Rossi before I slit the kid’s throat on his eighteenth birthday!"
"Drop the pistol, Miss Collins," Special Agent Vance said smoothly, leveling his heavy silver handgun at Tessa’s shoulder as he stepped down the hallway toward her. "My FBI badge clears this entire house as a federal raid gone wrong in twenty minutes. Hand over the baby, and I’ll make sure it’s quick."
Tessa backed slowly through the open double doors of the master bedroom toward the high stone balcony overlooking the lakefront lawn, keeping her body angled to shield Leo’s head and holding the compact Glock pointed straight at Agent Vance’s chest.
"Your badge won't save you when Dante gets out of that tunnel downtown," Tessa said calmly, her finger tightening on the trigger.
"Castellano is buried under forty tons of reinforced concrete on Congress Street!" Vance laughed coldly, lunging forward to knock the smaller pistol out of her hand.
He underestimated a woman fighting for her child.
The instant Vance stepped past the doorframe of the bedroom, Tessa fired two rapid shots straight into the unprotected gap between the collar of his Kevlar vest and his throat.
Special Agent Vance choked in stunned horror, his silver pistol clattering to the floor as he collapsed backward into the path of Rossi’s two gunmen in the narrow doorway.
In the two-second chaos of Vance’s body blocking the doorway, Tessa slammed the heavy three-inch oak master bedroom door shut, threw the steel security bar across the frame, and retreated into the reinforced marble master bathroom with Leo safe against her chest as bullets splintered the outer oak wood.
"Break that door down!" Don Rossi roared from the hallway outside, the heavy thud of a steel battering ram slamming against the oak panel. "Get in there!"
BOOM. The oak door cracked down the center.
Tessa braced her back against the marble bathroom counter, shielding Leo with her left arm and raising the Glock with her right hand toward the splintering bedroom door, five rounds left in her magazine.
BOOM. The steel security bar tore half out of the plaster wall.
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Then, from the front driveway below the balcony windows, came a sound that made the blood freeze in the veins of every Brooklyn gunman in the house:
The monstrous roar of an armored six-wheeled tactical truck smashing straight through the front limestone portico of the mansion itself—followed by the furious, terrifying battle cry of thirty Castellano soldiers storming up the grand staircase.
