Chapter 9 - Wrath of the Don
"Get him up! Get the boy on the gurney!" Victor screamed, bursting into the room with two tactical medics.
Marco was breathing—deep, steady, miraculous breaths. The gaping holes in his abdomen had closed into thick, pink scar tissue. The man was unconscious, but his vitals were stable.
Noah was not.
His skin was freezing cold. His lips were blue. His pulse was so faint that even Dr. Warren, who had arrived with the secondary convoy, struggled to find it on his carotid artery.
"Cardiac arrest imminent," Warren yelled, tearing open Noah’s shirt and applying manual chest compressions. "His body has depleted all glucose and cellular energy! We need immediate IV dextrose, epinephrine, and blood transfusions! Move! Move!"
They lifted Noah onto a transport stretcher and sprinted up the narrow companionway toward the deck.
I stayed behind in the room.
On the floor, Matteo Rossi was groaning, dragging his broken body toward the doorway, trying to crawl away like a wounded serpent.
I walked over, stepped on his golden cane, snapping the wood in two, and planted my combat boot squarely on his spine, pinning him to the steel deck.
"Richard..." Rossi wheezed, spitting blood. "Mercy... I'm an old man... have mercy..."
I looked down at the blood on my hands—Noah’s blood. The blood of an eight-year-old boy who had known nothing but suffering, who had nearly died to save my family.
"Mercy is for human beings, Matteo," I said, my voice dead and devoid of warmth. "You are an infection."
I did not draw my gun.
I picked up the heavy bone marrow needle that Vance had left on the floor. The four-inch steel trocar gleamed beneath the harsh fluorescent lights.
"You wanted the cure, didn't you?" I whispered, leaning down until my mouth was inches from his ear. "You wanted to live forever."
Rossi’s eyes went wide with pure, unadulterated terror. He began to scream, thrashing against my boot, but I held him down with the weight of an empire.
I drove the steel needle deep into his shoulder, pinning him to the wooden floorboards of the shipping container.
"Live with that until the ship sinks," I said.
I turned around, walked out of the room, and stepped into the corridor.
"Victor," I said calmly over the radio.
*"Boss?"*
"Open the sea valves. Scuttle the ship. Let the harbor take the trash."
"Understood, Don Vale."
I climbed the iron ladder to the upper deck, stepping out into the cold, crisp winter air just as the first light of dawn broke over the ocean. The eastern horizon was painted in brilliant streaks of violet and gold.
Down on the pier, the ambulance was already speeding away toward the city’s premier private trauma center under a heavy escort of four armed Escalades, their sirens cutting through the morning silence.
Behind me, the *St. Jude* groaned as thousands of gallons of freezing seawater rushed into its lower compartments, dragging Matteo Rossi, William Vance, and the remnants of their corrupt empire down into the black abyss of the Atlantic.
May you like
I did not look back. I sprinted toward my car, praying to a God I hadn't spoken to in thirty years to spare my son.
***
