Chapter 6 - Blood on the Peonies
The attack did not come from the front gates where the security cameras had thirty-foot sweeps across the asphalt.
It came through the old culvert—the six-foot storm pipe that drained the runoff from the Palisades Interstate Parkway down into the ravine behind the Moretti carriage house.
Marco was on the second-floor terrace when the first flare went up.
It was not a military flare; it was a commercial marine distress signal, bright, phosphorus-white, turning the frozen snow on the lawn into a flat sheet of blue-white glare that threw fifty-foot shadows from the cedar trees.
The sound followed: three sharp, rhythmic cracks from a suppressed rifle.
Down in the lower paddock, one of the two black Malinois didn't even yelp. It merely dropped against the chain-link fence, its dark body sliding through the sleet like an empty coat.
“Dario!” Marco shouted into the radio clipped to his lapel.
Static answered. Then a wet, coughing sound that ended in two rapid *thwip-thwip* noises—the distinct sound of nine-millimeter rounds passing through an interior drywall.
“East terrace,” Dario’s voice came through, shredded by blood and interference. “They’re inside the service basement, Marco. They have the thermite. They’re burning the panel.”
Marco didn't run down the stairs.
A man who had survived three syndicate wars in Hudson County knew that the stairs were where you died—they were a funnel, sixty degrees of choke point with nowhere to drop when the buckshot started clearing the landings.
He racked the slide of the Kimber, reached into the small false-drawer of the antique console beside the bedroom door, and pulled out an old Italian Franchi SPAS-12 with the stock folded over the receiver.
The house shuddered.
A dull, heavy *boom* came from sixty feet below—not high explosive, but the violent overpressure of an acetylene tank breaching the boiler room wall. The lights in the chandelier flickered once, turned the color of dirty orange peel, and died.
The emergency floods in the gallery clicked on three seconds later—cold, white, battery-operated halogens that hummed like a nest of hornets.
Marco moved through the hallway with his boots making no sound on the runner.
His eyes were not on the corners; they were on the floorboards, looking for the tiny slivers of shadow that indicated a man with a gun was standing on the other side of an archway.
He reached the east wing door.
The brass handle was cold. He pushed it open with his left elbow, the Franchi leveled at waist height, the safety clicking off with a metallic *clack* that sounded like an iron gate shutting.
Alina was not in her wheelchair.
She was on the floor beside the heavy oak pedestal that held a bronze bust of her grandfather. Her fingers were hooked into the pedestal’s carved acanthus leaves, her face white as chalk, her body trembling with a violent, rhythmic palsy that shook the hem of her nightshirt.
Beside her, sitting on the lower shelf of the bookcase with her knees tucked into her chest, was Sophia.
The toddler was not crying.
She had her hands over her ears, her eyes squeezed shut until her eyelashes met her cheeks, rocking herself back and forth against the leather-bound volumes of Dante’s *Purgatorio*.
“Alina,” Marco hissed.
Alina looked up.
Her eyes were not the eyes of a ten-year-old girl who had spent the afternoon crying over parallel bars. They were wide, black, dilated until the brown irises were merely thin rims around the pupils.
“They’re in the cellar,” Alina whispered.
“I know.”
“They’re behind the salt bags,” she said. Her voice was flat, carrying that terrifying, hollow certainty that Marco had heard only once before—from his own mother the night the coast guard cutter ran his father’s skiff down in the bay. “They have the blue cans, Papa. They’re pouring it on Matteo’s motorcycle.”
Marco felt a cold drop of sweat track down the valley of his spine.
There was no camera in the salt cellar. The feed had been dead since the storm on Tuesday.
“How do you know that?” he asked, his voice barely louder than the hum of the emergency halogens.
“The dog told her,” Alina said, pointing a shaking, pale finger at Sophia. “The gray one. He’s standing on the stairs right now. He’s biting the man with the red hat.”
From the floor below, directly beneath the parquet where Marco stood, came a scream.
It was not a man shouting an order. It was not the professional, disciplined grunt of a soldier taking fire.
It was the high, thin, bubbling shriek of a human being whose throat was being torn out by something with sixty pounds of jaw pressure and three-inch teeth.
A shotgun blast answered—a heavy, muffled *thump* that blew a circle of white plaster dust out of the ceiling medallion forty feet down the hall.
Marco didn't hesitate.
He didn't look at the stairs. He dropped to one knee beside Alina, his hand seizing her upper arm with enough force to leave four purple fingerprints through the linen.
“Can you crawl?” he demanded.
“No.”
“Alina. Look at me. Matteo is dead. If you don't move your hands, we are going to burn in this room.”
Alina looked into her father’s face.
She saw the gray stubble on his jaw, the tiny fleck of dried blood on his earlobe from an old shaving cut, the terrible, hollow terror of a man who had realized that all his millions, all his politicians in Trenton, and all his nine-millimeter pistols could not buy back five seconds of a Tuesday afternoon on Route 9W.
She didn't look at her legs.
She looked at Sophia.
The toddler had opened her eyes. She was looking at the door that led to the service gallery—the door where the gray smoke was already beginning to seep beneath the mahogany sill, thin, blue, smelling of scorched lead and synthetic carpet fibers.
“Sophia,” Alina whispered.
“The dog is bleeding,” the child said simply. She reached out her small hand, her fingers curling around the brass handle of the bronze bust. “He said you have to pull the big iron now.”
The door to the gallery blew inward.
***
The man who entered was not Luca Santoro.
It was one of the Montreal cousins—a man named Levesque who had spent eight years in the special service before the syndicates bought his pension. He was wearing an olive-drab tactical vest over a gray fleece, his face covered by a black Nomex balaclava that showed only two pale, water-blue eyes and a mouth with two gold incisors.
He carried a short-barreled Remington 870, the pump already back, an empty red hull spinning through the air behind his elbow.
Marco fired the Franchi.
The twelve-gauge slug caught Levesque in the center of his chest plate. The impact was massive—the sound of an iron sledge striking an anvil wrapped in wet blankets.
The Canadian flew backward three yards, his boots gouging two white furrows through the antique runner, his head hitting the doorframe with a wet *thud*.
He didn't stay down.
The ceramic trauma plate had held. He rolled to his knees with the speed of an animal, his shotgun coming up, the barrel leveling directly at Marco’s hip.
Marco racked the SPAS-12.
The action jammed.
A stovepipe—the empty hull had caught in the ejection port, squeezed between the bolt face and the receiver like a crushed finger.
Marco dropped the shotgun and reached for the Kimber under his left arm.
He was too slow.
A man at forty-four, with two shattered lumbar vertebrae from a hit-and-run twenty years ago, was half a second slower than a thirty-year-old mercenary who did three hundred pull-ups a day in a Quebec basement.
Levesque’s finger tightened on the Remington’s trigger.
Alina did not think.
She did not consult the charts Rachel had pinned to the wall of the solarium. She did not look for the afferent pathways, the spinal reflex arcs, or the five-thousand-dollar neurological reconstructions from the clinic in Zurich.
She grabbed the edge of the bronze bust of Eduardo Moretti—eighty pounds of cold, green-crusted Italian bronze.
She did not lift it with her arms.
She drove her right foot down.
Her heel—the white, cold, turnip-colored heel that Sophia had blown raspberries on forty-eight hours earlier—struck the marble floor with the force of a falling pile-driver.
The bone held.
The nerve, crushed and silent for one hundred and forty days, screamed with a sound that felt like liquid copper being injected into the marrow.
She stood.
Her left leg was dead, a bent post of bone and meat, but her right hip locked. The gluteus maximus, scarred and shrunk from five months of bed-rest, fired with a single, catastrophic spasm that threw her entire sixty-pound torso forward.
She shoved the pedestal.
The oak column toppled. The eighty-pound bronze head of Eduardo Moretti fell like a meteorite, swinging through a sixty-degree arc before it struck the barrel of Levesque’s shotgun.
The Remington discharged into the ceiling.
The blast took out three square yards of lath and plaster, raining white chalk down over the three of them like a sudden, interior snowstorm.
The bronze head didn't stop. It continued its arc, striking the Canadian’s right knee with a sound like a dry branch snapping under an iron wheel.
Levesque screamed—a high, wet, soldier’s shriek—and dropped onto his side, his hands clawing at his shattered patella.
Marco’s Kimber cleared the leather.
Two rounds.
The sound in the enclosed gallery was deafening, the muzzle flash illuminating the falling plaster dust in two strobes of orange-white fire.
Levesque went still.
Marco did not look at the dead man. He dropped to his knees, his hands reaching out to catch Alina as she fell.
She didn't hit the marble.
She collapsed into her father’s chest, her fingers bunching the wool of his overcoat, her face pressed against the Galco leather rig that smelled of gun oil and sweat.
“Papa,” she gasped.
Marco was crying.
He had not wept when Matteo’s casket went into the gray earth at Gate of Heaven. He had not wept when the surgeon had come out of the six-hour reconstruction with blood on his clogs and said *“She will probably need assistance with basic functions, Mr. Moretti.”*
He wept now, great, dry, shuddering sobs that shook his entire six-foot frame, his forehead pressed against his daughter’s crown, his fingers tangled in her dark, dust-covered hair.
“You stood,” he choked out. “You stood, Alina.”
From the corner of the bookcase, Sophia got down from her shelf.
She walked through the white plaster dust, leaving small, circular footprints that looked like the tracks of a small bear. She stopped beside Levesque’s dead boot, reached down, picked up a spent brass shell casing that was still warm enough to smell of cordite, and turned it over in her palm.
“The gray dog is gone now,” the toddler said to the ceiling. “He had to go back to the river.”
Alina lifted her head from her father’s shoulder.
Her right foot was throbbing. It was an ugly, sickening, wonderful pain—the pain of a living limb that had been dragged back across the border from the dead.
“He wasn't a dog,” Alina whispered through her tears.
Sophia looked at her. Her small face was completely serious, her bangs dusted with white plaster until she looked like an old woman who had shrunk to three feet tall.
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“He was Matteo,” the child said, as if explaining why the sky was blue or why the toast needed butter. “He told me to tell you the skates still fit. You just have to change the laces.”
***
