Chapter 299: Dante Got Away

Dimitri picked up a knife from one of the fallen bodies...a good blade, ten inches of surgical steel, and moved deeper into the warehouse.

A man came at him from the left with a baton. Dimitri sidestepped, grabbed his wrist, twisted until the bone snapped, then drove the knife into the soft underside of the man’s throat. The man made a wet choking sound and collapsed.

Three more men tried to pin him down using overlapping fire from different angles. Dimitri grabbed the corpse of the man he’d just killed and hurled it at one of the gunners. The body tangled the man up, threw off his aim just enough. Dimitri covered the distance and stabbed him twice...once in the abdomen, once in the heart.

The firefight became a blur.

Muzzle flashes lighting up the darkness. The smell of gunpowder and blood. The wet sounds of bodies hitting concrete. Men screaming. Men dying.

This wasn’t combat anymore. This was execution.

Dimitri was a force of nature, an unstoppable thing, cutting through Dante’s security team like a scythe through wheat. He moved with a precision that suggested every step had been calculated, every shot had been planned, every knife stroke had been measured for maximum lethality.

A man tried to tackle him. Dimitri let him come, then drove his knee up with enough force to destroy internal organs. The man crumpled.

Another man came at him with a knife. They fought for fifteen seconds, moving with the speed and precision of experts. Then Dimitri got the blade, turned it, and drove it into the man’s own chest.

By the time the gunfire stopped, nine of Dante’s original twelve men were dead.

Three had run.

And Dante was standing at the back of the warehouse, bleeding from a dozen wounds, breathing hard, his eyes wide with the understanding that he’d made a catastrophic miscalculation.

"You can’t kill me," Dante said, his voice defiant even as his body sagged. "I have backup coming. I have...."

"Luca," Dimitri said, finishing the sentence. "Your extraction team. Your insurance."

And as if on cue, the sound of vehicles screeching to a halt outside the warehouse reached them.

The doors exploded inward.

A fresh team of men, twenty of them this time, military-trained, coordinated, moving with the precision of soldiers. And at the front of them was a man Dimitri recognized from intelligence reports: Luca, ex-Italian military, Dante’s second in command.

"Go!" Luca was shouting. "Move! Get Boss to the vehicle!"

The new arrivals laid down suppressing fire, a wall of bullets that forced Dimitri back into cover. He fired several shots, took down two of the incoming men, but the volume of fire was simply too intense.

Luca reached Dante, grabbed him, started moving him toward the exit.

Dimitri moved to follow, but three men blocked his path, and for a moment he had to deal with them. He went through them like a machine....gun, knife, hands, any weapon that was available. But by the time he cleared them, Luca and Dante were at the vehicles.

Dimitri fired, the shots purposeful but not aimed to kill. He was herding them now, driving them toward the exit, not trying to stop them but making sure they understood they were running.

Dante looked back one final time, his shoulder shattered, his body broken, his face a mask of fury and something that might have been shame.

"This isn’t over," Dante said, his voice carrying across the warehouse.

"No," Dimitri agreed, raising his gun. "It’s not."

He fired, and the bullet caught Dante in the leg, bringing him down. Luca grabbed him, practically dragging him toward the vehicle now, blood streaming from Dante’s wounds.

The vehicles screeched away from the warehouse, tires smoking, leaving a trail of destruction behind them.

Dimitri stood in the doorway, breathing hard, covered in blood, watching them disappear into the Jersey night.

For a moment, there was complete silence.

Then he turned and looked back at the warehouse.

Twenty-three bodies. Some of them still moving slightly, the death reflex not fully complete. Blood painting the concrete floor in intricate patterns. The smell of copper and gunpowder thick enough to choke on.

This was what happened when you came at Dimitri Valentino unprepared.

This was the cost of misunderstanding who you were dealing with.

Marco arrived ten minutes later with a cleanup crew. He took one look at the devastation and whistled low.

"How many?" he asked.

"Twenty-three," Dimitri said. "Maybe twenty-four if the ones who ran bleed out before they get medical attention."

"And Dante?"

"Got away," Dimitri said, his voice steady but carrying an edge of fury beneath it. "But he’s wounded. Shoulder, leg, ribs. He won’t be moving fast."

"Should we pursue?"

"No," Dimitri said. "Let him run. Let him think he’s won. Let him go to ground and heal. Because next time, there won’t be any backup. Next time, there won’t be any escape route. Next time, he dies in a room with no one to help him."

Marco nodded, understanding the logic.

"What about Luca?" he asked.

"Find him," Dimitri commanded. "I want to know everything about him. His connections, his family, his weaknesses. Because Luca is the variable that kept Dante alive. Luca is the insurance policy. And if we remove Luca from the board, Dante becomes very easy to kill."

"Understood," Marco said.

***

Dimitri left the warehouse and drove back to Manhattan. The sun was rising over the East River by the time he reached the penthouse, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink.

Eve was waiting in the kitchen, coffee made, her eyes taking in the blood on his clothes.

She didn’t ask what happened. She just pulled him toward the bathroom and turned the shower on, hot water and steam filling the space.

"Dante got away," Dimitri said, standing under the spray.

"I know," Eve said, washing the blood from his skin with a gentleness that contrasted sharply with the violence it was removing. "Marco called."

"He’s wounded. He’ll be back."

"I know," Eve said again. "And next time, you’ll be ready for him."

"Next time," Dimitri agreed, pulling her close, "I’m going to take away everything that keeps him safe. And then I’m going to kill him."

Eve held him while the water washed away the blood.

And in that moment, Dimitri made a decision. A decision that would reshape the entire landscape of this war.

He was going to find Luca.

And he was going to break him.

Because once Luca was gone, Dante would have nowhere to run.

And then the hunt would become very, very simple.