"Translate It!” The Mafia Boss Mocked Her—Seconds Later, He Froze In Shock

Lucian kicked open the heavy steel fire door of the service stairwell and looked down the vertical gap between the iron railings.

Three stories below them, passing the twenty-first-floor landing, two massive gunmen in blue hospital scrubs were carrying Arthur Mercer between them by the arms, while the third man—the team leader, wearing a white lab coat with an automatic pistol drawn—covered the stairs above them.

If Lucian fired down the narrow stairwell from three floors up while they were carrying a sixty-eight-year-old man with Parkinson’s, a single sudden movement or ricochet could drop Arthur headfirst down the concrete steps!

"Wait—don't shoot from up here!" Elena whispered urgently, grabbing Lucian’s wrist. "The passenger elevator bank on the north side of the hall isn't on the freight circuit! Take it down to the third floor—the service stairs cross over the kitchen pantry corridor on three before reaching the basement loading dock! We can cut them off flat on the level!"

Lucian didn't waste half a second questioning her knowledge of Manhattan building codes.

He grabbed her hand, sprinted fifty feet down the hall to the north passenger elevator, and keyed in his master executive override code—sending the high-speed cab plummeting straight from the twenty-fourth floor to the third floor without stopping!

Meanwhile, down in the concrete stairwell at the sixth-floor landing, Arthur Mercer wasn't making it easy for his kidnappers.

Despite his frail frame and the tremor in his right hand, the retired Columbia professor had spent forty years studying ancient warfare—and he knew perfectly well that men who used stun batons on his daughter’s bodyguards weren't taking him for an MRI.

"Che cosa volete da mia figlia, bastardi?!" Arthur barked in booming, scholarly Italian, purposefully letting his legs go completely dead-weight and hooking the heel of his orthopedic loafer around the iron baluster of the fifth-floor railing—Bringing both cursing gunmen to a stumbling halt on the narrow landing and costing them twenty precious seconds to pry his grip loose!

"Shut the old man up and drag him!" the leader in the white lab coat snarled in Neapolitan, glancing nervously up the empty stairwell. "The van is waiting in the 76th Street alley—if we miss the noon boat at Pier 90, Costa skins us alive!"

They wrenched Arthur’s shoe free and hauled him down to the third-floor crossover corridor, kicking open the fire door that led through the deserted banquet pantry toward the basement loading ramp.

The leader in the white lab coat stepped through the doorway first—and walked straight into the barrel of Lucian Bellini’s gun.

Lucian was standing flat against the blind side of the stainless-steel pantry wall. Before the gunman could even shout a warning to the two men behind him, Lucian drove the steel slide of his 1911 across the man’s jaw, knocking him cold onto the tiles without firing a shot that might make the other two drop Arthur!

Seeing their leader go down, the two remaining kidnappers on the stairwell threshold froze—using Arthur Mercer’s body as a shield between themselves and Lucian while the man on the right raised a suppressed Beretta over Arthur’s frail shoulder!

"Drop it, Bellini, or the old man takes one in the spine!" the gunman shouted in broken English.

Behind Lucian in the pantry doorway, Elena stepped into view.

Her father saw her—and instead of panicking, Arthur Mercer’s eyes locked onto his daughter’s face and he spoke four rapid words in Latin—the exact phrase from Livy’s History of Rome that he had quizzed her on every Sunday throughout her childhood whenever a Roman general feigned collapse to open a flank:

"Ad terram, mea filia!" (To the ground, my daughter!)

Elena knew what her father was going to do a split second before the gunmen did.

"He’s dropping left, Lucian!" Elena shouted.

At that exact instant, Arthur Mercer threw his entire weight limp to the left and tucked his chin into his chest, folding straight down to the floor between the two startled kidnappers and leaving the right-hand gunman’s head and chest completely exposed!

Thwip! Thwip!

Lucian fired twice.

Both subsonic rounds took the armed kidnapper dead center in the chest, slamming him backward against the concrete stairwell wall, while Lucian lunged forward across the threshold and drove his knee straight into the ribs of the second unarmed man, pinning him to the floor as Elena rushed forward and dropped to her knees beside her father!

"Dad! Dad, are you hurt?!" Elena gasped, cradling her father’s silver head in her lap on the pantry floor.