Chapter 8
Rocco Caruso stepped out onto the second-floor portico.
He wore no body armor, no helmet. He stood tall in his tailored dark three-piece suit, an open-collared dress shirt, his wavy dark hair catching the autumn breeze, his hands resting easily on the stone balustrade.
"The keys don't belong to Marcus, Tony," Rocco said.
His deep, raspy baritone was not loud, but it cut through the crisp night air with terrifying clarity.
Tony Moretti froze. His arrogant grin vanished, replaced by a shockwave of sheer, disbelieving horror as his eyes locked onto the living, breathing Don of New York standing under the moonlight.
"Open fire!" Moretti screamed, raising his weapon toward the balcony. "Kill him!"
Before a single mercenary could pull a trigger, the quiet night exploded into thunder.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
From the slate roofline, the dark carriage house, and the pine tree line, eighteen high-intensity green laser sights flared to life simultaneously.
The two mercenaries flanking Moretti dropped instantly to the gravel, high-caliber armor-piercing rounds punching clean through their ballistic plates before their weapons could level.
The driveway became an inescapable kill zone.
Rocco’s marksmen fired with surgical, synchronized discipline. High-caliber rounds shattered the engine blocks of the four SUVs, sending geysers of pressurized steam hissing into the cold air. Windshields disintegrated into spiderwebs of white fractures; tires blew out with deafening pops.
The mercenaries scrambled frantically for cover behind the ruined vehicles, firing blind, chaotic bursts into the darkness, but they were completely outmatched by prepared, interlocking fields of fire.
Within ninety seconds, the gunfire ceased entirely.
Twelve Philadelphia mercenaries lay dead or incapacitated across the white gravel; the remaining four were on their knees with their hands clasped behind their heads, pinned by the laser dots glowing against their foreheads.
Tony Moretti stood alone beside his smoking vehicle, his weapon discarded in the dirt, his hands raised in trembling surrender, his leather coat covered in pulverized glass.
Rocco descended the grand limestone staircase with slow, untouchable authority. His polished leather shoes crunched softly over the spent brass casings. He stopped five feet from Moretti, his slate-gray eyes dead as winter ice.
"You brought sixteen men to my home, Tony," Rocco whispered, every word carved from volcanic stone. "On my engagement night."
"Rocco... listen to me!" Moretti choked out, his knees shaking against the gravel. "Marcus sold us the contract! He told us the Five Families had already sanctioned your removal! We were just executing a corporate transition!"
"A transition," Rocco murmured, tilting his head slightly.
He drew his customized matte-black 1911 from his shoulder holster. With calm, mechanical precision, Rocco pressed the cold steel barrel directly against the center of Moretti’s forehead.
"Tell your boss in Philadelphia," Rocco whispered into Moretti’s ear, "that if another car crosses the Delaware River bearing a Moretti crest, I will not call the Commission. I will come to his home myself. And I will burn his family to the ground."
Rocco lowered the weapon and fired a single round through Moretti’s right knee.
Moretti shrieked in agony, collapsing hard onto the stones, clutching his shattered joint as blood pooled beneath his trousers.
"Frank," Rocco commanded, turning his back on the screaming man.
May you like
"Yes, Don Rocco?"
"Throw the survivors into the back of their own truck," Rocco ordered, walking back toward the grand portico. "Drive them to the state line and leave them on the shoulder of the turnpike. Let them crawl back to Philadelphia."
