Chapter 4 - The Trap at Dawn
Before I could process the full terror of the realization, Dominic was already moving toward the door.
“Vance,” he spoke into his lapel communicator, his voice cold and commanding. “Assemble a tactical team. Two armored units. We’re moving out immediately.”
“Mr. Moretti, wait!” I rushed after him into the hallway, grabbing his sleeve. “If he’s waiting at my mother’s apartment, it’s a trap! You can't go walking into an unknown neighborhood with a private army—it’ll cause a war!”
“It is not a war, Elena,” Dominic said, turning to look down at me, his eyes dark and resolute. “It is a cleanup. Nobody touches a child under my roof, and nobody threatens the people working in my home.”
“Let me come with you,” I pleaded.
“No.”
“He’s looking for me and my family! If the music box is what he wants, I need to be there to end this!”
Dominic studied my face for three long seconds. He saw the raw, desperate defiance in my eyes—the same quiet strength that had kept me alive and working two jobs to protect Lily. Slowly, he nodded.
“Stay behind me,” he instructed, pulling a sleek, matte-black firearm from a concealed holster beneath his tailored jacket and checking the magazine with practiced efficiency. “If I tell you to run, you run.”
Within twenty minutes, a convoy of three black SUVs slid silently out of the Hawthorne estate gates, vanishing into the pre-dawn fog of the New York streets.
The ride to my mother’s residential building in Queens felt agonizingly short. The streets were deserted, the streetlamps casting sickly yellow halos across the wet asphalt. As our vehicles pulled up half a block away from the apartment complex, my heart hammered wildly against my ribs.
“Perimeter secure,” Vance’s voice crackled through the comms. “Front door is forced open. First-floor window is smashed. Someone is already inside.”
Dominic’s jaw tightened. He turned to me in the back seat. “Stay in the vehicle. Lock the doors. Do not open them for anyone except me.”
Before I could protest, Dominic and four armed operatives slipped out into the fog, moving with the silent, lethal grace of shadows.
I pressed my face against the cold glass of the SUV window, straining my eyes through the dim light. Minutes ticked by like hours. Faint sounds—the splintering of wood, a sharp shout, the heavy thud of boots—echoed faintly from inside the apartment building.
Then came a sound that froze the blood in my veins.
May you like
Bang.
A single gunshot cracked through the silent dawn.
