Chapter 6 - The Tin Box in the Wall
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Through the open doorway of her demolished studio—where her thrifted clothes, her paperback books, and her meager jars of saved waitress tips lay scattered across the slashed mattress—Jade had a clear line of sight into the narrow tiled bathroom.
One of the Russians was kneeling with his back to the door, pulling the loose brick out from behind the radiator pipe, while the second man stood by the bathroom mirror with a suppressed Makarov pistol in his hand, watching the reflection of the room.
Before the man at the mirror could shift his eyes two inches to the left and spot them in the dark hallway, Enzo stepped across the threshold beside Jade, shoulder-to-shoulder.
Two suppressed pistols barked simultaneously—Enzo’s SIG Sauer and Jade’s Glock, fitted with the spare suppressor Enzo had screwed onto her threaded barrel on the roof.
Thwip! Thwip! Thwip!
The guard by the mirror took two rounds through the reflection and collapsed into the bathtub, pulling the plastic shower curtain down with him, while the kneeling man by the radiator jerked forward as Enzo’s bullet took him cleanly behind the ear.
Silence fell over the ruined apartment, broken only by the hiss of rain blowing through the cracked window and the rhythmic drip of the bathroom faucet.
"Sixty seconds before the driver in the G-Wagon out front wonders why his boys stopped answering their throat mics," Enzo said quietly, stepping into the studio to watch the front street window through a gap in the blinds. "Get what you came for."
Jade holstered the Glock at the small of her back, stepped over the body on her bathroom floor without looking down, and reached deep into the hollow chimney flue behind the loose radiator brick.
Her fingers closed around a rusted, rectangular olive-oil tin that had been wrapped in three layers of heavy black electrical tape eighteen years ago.
She pulled it out, wiped the soot off on her jeans, and tucked it inside the waterproof lining of her denim jacket. Then she grabbed the small canvas backpack stuffed inside her toilet tank—her emergency go-bag containing three thousand dollars in cash, her late mother’s silver wedding band, and a spare pair of boots—and stepped back out into the main room.
Enzo was standing beside her small kitchen table, looking down at the eviction notice from her landlord sitting next to a stack of unpaid electric bills and community college equivalency textbooks.
When he looked up at her, the ruthless killer who had just dropped two men without blinking had vanished—replaced by a strange, quiet intensity as he took in the Spartan poverty she had been living in while hiding from the deadliest syndicate in New York.
"You’ve been living on four hours of sleep and instant noodles in a freezing walk-up," Enzo murmured, "while sitting on something Viktor Volkov is willing to pay two million dollars for."
"Because the moment anyone opens this tin on a computer connected to a network, everyone named inside it starts dying," Jade said coldly, zipping her jacket up to her chin. "Let’s go before the driver downstairs calls for backup."
They didn't go back up the skylight. Instead, they slipped down the back service stairs into the basement alley, climbed into the waiting Escalade, and vanished into the rain thirty seconds before the two men in the G-Wagon out front realized their strike team was dead.
Twenty minutes later, the armored Escalade passed through two sets of twelve-foot reinforced steel gates at the tip of the Charlestown peninsula—entering the private, heavily fortified four-acre waterfront estate and maritime terminal that served as the headquarters of the Moretti family.
Fourteen armed guards with assault rifles patrolled the floodlit seawall and the private yacht slip, while a massive, three-story brick-and-glass industrial loft conversion rose directly above the harbor water.
Enzo led Jade up the private freight elevator to the top-floor penthouse.
It was warm, vast, and smelled of cedarwood, espresso, and sea salt. Exposed brick walls met twenty-foot steel beams and bulletproof floor-to-ceiling glass looking out over the black waters of Boston Harbor.
Enzo locked the heavy steel doors behind them, stripped off his rain-soaked charcoal coat, and walked over to the stainless-steel island in the open kitchen, setting a heavy trauma kit on the marble counter.
"Take off the jacket and sit down," Enzo ordered quietly.
Jade stayed ten feet back near the elevator door, her hand resting over the bulge of the olive-oil tin inside her denim jacket. "I'm not opening the tin until we have a deal in writing, Moretti."
May you like
Enzo paused, looking across the room at her with his slate-gray eyes half-lidded.
"I didn't tell you to take off the jacket to give me the tin, Anya," Enzo said softly, pointing to the dark crimson stain soaking through the left sleeve of her denim jacket above her elbow—where a ricochet splinter of jacketed lead from the diner counter had sliced a three-inch gash across her tricep that she hadn't even felt through the adrenaline. "Sit on the stool before you bleed all over my rug."
