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Giorgio immediately called Niccolo, who had come and gotten me, Dario, and all the other brothers.
Now we stared in disbelief at what was unfolding before our eyes.
The image was green from the camera’s night vision, but what we saw was crystal clear.
The Turk was heading for the house with a dozen armed men behind him…
Alessandra was walking out in front of them…
And the Turk had a gun pointed at her back.
Dario looked enraged and stricken at the same time – like he was about to crawl out of his skin but couldn’t turn away from the nightmare onscreen.
“We have to kill him,” he said, his voice ragged and sick with worry. “NOW.”
I shook my head. “If we start shooting at them in the dark, we’ll hit Alessandra. And there’s 13 of them. There’s no way we can neutralize them all before they figure it out and threaten to kill her. Once that happens, it’ll become a standoff – and then all bets are off.”
Dario turned away and tore at his hair as he paced behind us. He looked like a man possessed by a demon.
“They’re heading for the hidden tunnel,” Niccolo said, urgency in his voice.
Dario whipped back to the screen to watch.
Alessandra was crawling along the ground, groping blindly for something in the underbrush.
“What’s she doing?” Valentino asked, mystified.
“She’s looking for the entrance to the passageway,” Niccolo realized. “Because she can’t see it in the darkness.”
Alessandra paused and apparently called out, because the Turk and a couple of his men ran over and disappeared down hidden stairs in the earth.
“How the fuck are they going to get in?!” Adriano snarled. “The door to the tunnel locks from the inside – there’s no lock to pick!”
“If they got this far,” Roberto said dourly, “they probably have a plan.”
Dario grabbed my arm. His fingers were like steel claws. “You have to help me save her – you HAVE to!”
“…I don’t know how,” I whispered helplessly.
“I do,” Niccolo said.
We all turned to look at him.
“They don’t realize there are cameras,” he said. “They haven’t looked up at them once, and they’ve made no attempt to cut the power to the house – which means they have no idea that we know they’re coming.”
“Oh shit!” Valentino said with an excited laugh. “They probably think we’re asleep – ”
“And that they’re going to sneak in the back, creep upstairs, and murder us in our beds,” Niccolo said. Then he grinned. “I say we let them.”
“…what?!” Adriano exclaimed.
Niccolo laid out his plan in broad strokes.
After he was done, Dario looked at me for any scrap of hope I could give him.
“It could work,” I agreed. “But we have to move NOW.”
As though to underscore my words, the camera in the tunnel showed a circular ring of fire that quickly whited out the entire image.
