Chapter 16 - Siege at Lake Forest
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Sirens and automatic rifle fire tore through the quiet winter morning as three armored black suburbans carrying New York plates smashed through the flaming wreckage of the front iron gates.
"Boss! We have forty shooters coming up the main drive and a second team flanking from the frozen lake behind the boat dock!" Roman roared, bursting into the foyer with a tactical assault rifle in his hands and tossing a heavy Kevlar vest and a spare Benelli shotgun toward Lucian. "Enzo and the capos are still twelve minutes out on the highway!"
Lucian didn't waste a second putting on the vest for himself. Instead, he slipped the titanium micro-drive and the gold vault key into Clara’s coat pocket, then pulled the heavy ballistic Kevlar vest straight over Clara’s shoulders, strapping the Velcro sides tightly around her torso despite her protests.
"Lucian, no! You're the one they're shooting at!" Clara cried, grabbing his wrists as glass shattered in the drawing room down the hall.
"If a stray bullet hits you, they don't need to shoot me—I'm already dead," Lucian said fiercely, kissing her hard on the mouth for one breathless second before chambering a shell into the shotgun with a loud clack. "Come on! We’re getting to the panic vault behind the third-floor library!"
Bullets raked across the tall leaded-glass windows of the foyer, exploding the marble busts along the wall into clouds of white powder as Lorenzo’s advance team reached the front portico.
Roman laid down a blistering wall of suppressive fire from the base of the grand staircase, dropping three black-clad gunmen as they kicked open the mahogany double doors, while Lucian grabbed Clara’s hand and shielding her body completely with his own broad back as they sprinted up the curving marble steps toward the second-floor landing.
"Don't let Sterling reach the upper floor!" a voice bellowed from the foyer below—cold, gravelly, and heavily accented.
Clara glanced back over the marble balustrade and caught a glimpse of Don Lorenzo Bellini stepping calmly through the shattered front doors in a long black fur-trimmed coat, flanked by four personal bodyguards carrying military-grade carbines. And standing right beside Don Lorenzo, pointing up toward the stairs with a malicious sneer, was Marcus Sterling Jr.—Lucian’s exiled cousin who was supposed to be living in Rome.
"It’s Marcus!" Clara gasped as they raced down the second-floor gallery toward the private oak stairwell leading up to the third-floor library. "Your cousin is with him!"
"Marcus always wanted my father’s ring, even if he had to crawl on his knees for New York to get it," Lucian snarled.
Just as they reached the narrow landing below the third-floor library door, two gunmen who had scaled the exterior conservatory roof smashed straight through the stained-glass skylight overhead, landing in a shower of colored glass ten feet in front of them.
Lucian shoved Clara hard behind the thick oak newel post and fired the shotgun from the hip.
The first blast caught the lead gunman square in the chest, hurling him back over the railing into the stairwell below.
The second gunman fired a three-round burst from his submachine gun just as Lucian lunged forward and snapped the man’s neck with the steel butt of the empty shotgun.
A sharp, hot spray of crimson splattered across the white wainscoting.
Lucian staggered half a step against the doorframe of the library, his left hand clamping tightly over the side of his charcoal suit jacket just below his ribcage, where dark red blood was already soaking rapidly through the wool.
"Lucian!" Clara screamed, rushing out from behind the post and catching his arm as he kicked the heavy steel-core library door shut and threw the deadbolt.
"I'm fine—it went through the side," Lucian gritted out between clenched teeth, though the color was draining fast from his sharp cheekbones as he dragged a seven-hundred-pound oak bookcase across the bolted door with one arm. "The panic room is behind the fireplace paneling. Move!"
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He pressed a hidden brass latch beneath the mantle, and a three-inch-thick steel door swung silently open into a reinforced concrete room stocked with monitors, weapons, and medical supplies.
The moment they stepped inside and sealed the hydraulic vault door from within, heavy boots slammed against the library door outside—and Lucian’s knees finally gave out, dropping him heavily against the concrete wall as blood pooled beneath his ribs.
