Waitress Slipped a Note to the Mafia Boss — “Your Girlfriend Sold You Out. They’re in Position.”

Rain began to fall again—cold, driving sheets that turned the steel helipad atop the Moretti Tower into a slick, gleaming arena suspended above the clouds.

Dante climbed the iron steps alone, his boots ringing silently against the wet metal until he emerged onto the circular platform.

At the far edge, where the wind whipped the red warning lights into blurred halos, Viktor Kael stood beside a locked maintenance shed, frantically trying to reach a chopper on his jammed satellite radio. Realizing the signal was dead, Viktor lowered the radio and spun around, leveling his silver-plated .357 Magnum at Dante’s chest.

Thirty feet separated them. Both men had their weapons drawn.

"You have nine lives, Moretti!" Viktor shouted over the roar of the wind and rain. "First the restaurant, then the docks, now the tower! All because one little waitress looked in a mirror!"

"You came into my city, bought my blood, and tried to burn a kid alive to get to me," Dante said, stepping calmly onto the center of the wet steel pad, his Glock steady as stone. "Your war ends tonight, Viktor."

"Does it?" Viktor laughed—a jagged, manic sound as he reached into his cashmere coat pocket with his left hand and pulled out a dead-man’s switch with a blinking red LED light. "Your men cleared the vans in the garage, didn't they? I saw them on my perimeter feed before your girl jammed the lights! Too bad the vans were just decoys for your security team!"

Dante stopped.

Behind him at the top of the iron stairwell, Clara and Luca emerged onto the deck edge, freezing as they saw the detonator clutched in Viktor’s fist.

"Where is the charge, Viktor?" Dante asked coldly.

"Not in this building!" Viktor grinned, blood on his lips from the biting wind. "Do you really think I don't know where you keep the people you care about once a war starts? When Camilla Sterling begged for her life this morning, she told me all about your private family compound up in Westchester—and the little private clinic in Manhattan where you always send injured associates for follow-up scans!"

Clara’s breath caught in her throat. No—Toby and Maya were still in the tower on the sixtieth floor. Viktor was bluffing, or his men had hit the wrong target.

Wait.

"You think the girl and her brother went down in that window basket?" Viktor sneered, glancing sideways at Clara standing by the stairwell. "Look at her! She’s right here! Which means the basket you lowered to the sixtieth-floor setback just landed right next to the secondary structural charge my climber rigged under the north terrace overhang ten minutes ago!"

Clara’s blood froze. The sixtieth-floor setback was directly beneath the north terrace overhang.

"If my thumb comes off this button," Viktor shouted, backing toward the edge of the helipad stair tower on the opposite side, "the entire north terrace and the sixtieth-floor balcony go up in a fireball! Drop the gun, Dante! Right now!"

For the first time since Clara had met him, Dante hesitated.

He looked from Viktor’s trembling thumb on the red switch over to Clara’s pale, terrified face—knowing her brother, her best friend, and an innocent child were sitting directly below that overhang.