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That night, thirty-seven DeLuca strongholds across New York went up in flames simultaneously. I wanted the entire underworld to know the price of betraying the Moretti family.
But Lorenzo escaped.
That goddamn snake had been crawling through the rubble for four years, scurrying like a sewer rat. My men had hunted him for four solid years, from the Bronx to Philly, from Boston to Baltimore.
Always one step behind.
"That abandoned auto shop in Queens is cleaned out too." Marco, our intelligence guy, pushed up his glasses, voice ice-cold. "Three DeLuca punks. Nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-three. All handled. Bodies dissolved in sulfuric acid. No one's finding them."
"Good." My voice came out low and gravelly, fingers tapping lightly on the file marked "Final Target." "Now it's just Lorenzo himself."
The conference room fell into brief silence.
Everyone knew this bloodbath was nearing its end. The DeLuca family's New York roots had been ripped out completely. The street thugs who once pledged loyalty to them had either surrendered or died without a trace.
Take out Lorenzo, and this four-year vendetta could finally be over.
"Don, we found Lorenzo's car at the New Jersey state line." Marco flipped open the latest intel. "Car was empty, but there was blood in the trunk. Our FBI mole says he might be injured."
"Then kick him while he's down and finish it." I stood, palms pressed flat on the table, looking down at everyone present. "Turn over every goddamn rat hole in New Jersey. I want to see Lorenzo's corpse within seventy-two hours. Understood?"
"Understood." The assembled officers lowered their heads in agreement, killing intent quietly permeating the hall.
Just as I was about to close the operation file, my private satellite phone on the mahogany table suddenly buzzed with a sharp vibration.
The screen lit up—not with an encrypted internal code, but with an unknown network IP that had forced its way through.
This was a top-secret number tied directly to my personal frequency. Less than three people alive in all of America knew this channel.
My brow furrowed sharply. I raised my hand to silence everyone, then swiped to answer.
The video call connected in half a second.
The moment the screen lit up, a twisted, grotesque face filled the entire frame—Lorenzo DeLuca. Severe burn scars covered half his face like crawling centipedes in the dim light. His cloudy eyeballs, bloodshot from extreme agitation, stared at the camera as he bared a mouthful of rotten teeth.
"Good morning, Don Moretti." Lorenzo's voice grated like sandpaper on sheet metal. "Heard you've been turning over every dumpster in the city looking for me? Why go to all that trouble? Look what I caught for you."
The camera shook violently, then pulled back sharply, focusing on a thick support column thirty feet away.
My breath froze completely in that microsecond, all the blood in my body seeming to reverse course and crash against my eardrums!
Ruby was bound tightly to a rust-covered concrete pillar with heavy rope!
She still wore the sweater from last night at the workshop, the collar torn with a gaping rip. Her once-pinned hair hung disheveled against her pale cheeks, a bright red trail of blood at the corner of her lips. She gasped violently, biting her whitened lower lip hard. Those amber eyes constricted sharply when they met the camera, and she screamed into the microphone with everything she had.
"Marcelo! Don't worry about me! Leon... go save Leon! Leon's in their hands!!"
"Shut your stinking mouth, bitch!"
Lorenzo backhanded her viciously across the face.
The sharp crack of flesh on flesh exploded through the speaker. Ruby's face snapped to the side, her whole body trembling violently from the pain, strands of hair sticking to her bloodied lips.
Uncontrollable rage and bloodlust detonated in my chest, my knuckles cracking as I clenched my fists.
"Lorenzo." I gripped the phone like a vice. "Lorenzo, you better pray I don't find you."
"Oh, don't get so worked up." He grinned savagely, turning the camera toward Ruby, one filthy hand roughly grabbing her chin. "Your little girlfriend's quite the piece. I gotta say, Moretti, you've got good taste. This body, this face... If I didn't have more important business right now, I'd love to really 'taste' her."
