Chapter 4 - The Tables Turn in the Dark
Time seemed to slow down to a crawl. Lorenzo looked at Marcus’s thumb resting on the detonator, then calculated the distance across the room. It was twenty feet—too far to cross before Marcus could depress the button. Bruno’s eyes met Lorenzo’s in a silent, split-second exchange forged from years of street-level warfare and absolute trust. They didn't need words. They had survived a hundred ambushes together, and they weren't about to die in a concrete cage built by a paranoid old man.
“You know, Marcus,” Lorenzo said calmly, lowering his gun by a fraction of an inch to trick the old man into a false sense of security. “You always underestimated me. You thought I was just a blunt instrument you could point and shoot.”
“You are nothing more than a tool, nephew—one that has outlived its usefulness,” Marcus sneered, his grip tightening slightly on the remote.
“Maybe,” Lorenzo said. “But you forgot one fundamental rule of the underworld.”
“And what’s that?” Marcus mocked.
“Never leave your primary backup server connected to an unencrypted local network.”
Marcus’s confident smile faltered for a fraction of a second. His eyes darted toward the primary computer bank behind him.
That microsecond of distraction was all Bruno needed. With lightning speed, Bruno didn’t aim at Marcus; instead, he whipped his arm around and fired a heavy-caliber round directly into the exposed master electrical transformer mounted on the stone wall beside the server rack.
CRACK-BOOM!
A blinding shower of blue electrical sparks exploded across the room, instantly plunging the subterranean vault into absolute, pitch-black darkness. The hum of the computer monitors died instantly, replaced by the screech of short-circuiting machinery.
“What—!” Marcus yelled in panic, frantically pressing his thumb down on the remote.
Nothing happened. The wireless detonator required an active local Wi-Fi frequency routed through the master server—a server that Bruno’s bullet had just completely fried into molten slag.
In the pitch-black darkness, Lorenzo moved like a ghost. Having memorized the layout of the room during his initial scan, he crossed the twenty-foot gap in three massive strides. He slammed his shoulder directly into Marcus’s chest, sending the old man flying backward over the mahogany desk.
Marcus crashed hard against the floor, the heavy gold lion ring flying from his finger and clattering across the stone tiles.
Lorenzo pinned him instantly, pressing his knee heavily into Marcus’s chest and driving the barrel of his SIG Sauer right beneath the old man’s chin. The amber emergency backup lights flickered on overhead, casting a harsh, sickly glow over the scene. Marcus gasped for air, his face pale and twisted with sudden, desperate terror.
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“The game is over, Uncle,” Lorenzo whispered, his voice shaking with a cold, terrifying fury. “You lost.”
Bruno stepped out of the shadows, kicking the black detonator away across the floor before calmly clicking his handcuffs onto Marcus’s wrists. “Federal authorities are going to love this green folder, boss. Every shell company, every bribe, every wire transfer—it’s all backed up on our encrypted drive upstairs. Marcus is going away for the rest of his natural life.”
