Chapter 16 - The Wrath
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Dante stood in the center of the botanical gardens greenhouse. The orchids were trampled, the glass shattered.
Silas was sitting on a gurney, heavily groggy from the tranquilizer, fighting the paramedics who were trying to treat him.
“I failed you, Boss,” Silas grunted, looking up at Dante with deep, profound shame. “They hit me with a heavy sedative. They dragged her through the maintenance exit.”
Dante did not yell. He did not break anything. The cold, terrifying silence radiating from him was infinitely more dangerous than rage. He was perfectly, completely still.
“Find her phone,” Dante whispered, his voice a lethal hum.
His men scoured the dirt. A guard held up a cracked smartphone.
Dante took it. He plugged it into a specialized decryption tablet his tech specialist handed him. Within minutes, the screen illuminated a harsh truth. A secondary device had been actively pinging Emma’s location through an old, shared cloud service.
Dante looked at the name registered to the pinging device. Marcus Vance.
“He sold her,” Dante said softly.
He didn't need to issue orders. His men knew exactly what the tone of his voice meant. The careful, strategic war was over. The gloves were off.
“Arm everyone,” Dante commanded, walking toward his SUV. “Bring the heavy tactical gear. Breach charges, automatic weapons, incendiaries. We are not negotiating a ransom. We are going to erase Volkov from the map.”
“Boss, if we hit them with that much force, the Chicago police will have to respond,” his underboss warned.
“Let them respond,” Dante said, pulling a heavy, tactical shotgun from the trunk of his vehicle. His silver eyes were dead, reflecting nothing but absolute murder. “If Emma is not returned to me alive, there will not be a city left for the police to protect.”
The convoy rolled out. It wasn't a stealth operation. It was a localized apocalypse. Dante’s intelligence network pinpointed the pinged location to an abandoned meatpacking facility on the outskirts of the city limits.
When the convoy arrived, they didn't knock.
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Dante’s lead armored SUV slammed directly through the chained metal gates of the facility at sixty miles an hour, crushing Volkov’s exterior guards instantly.
The siege had begun. Dante stepped out of the vehicle into the freezing rain, racking the shotgun, and walked straight into the gunfire.
