Chapter 8 - THE SNIPER IN THE DARK
Vanessa hit the tar-paper roof with a soft, heavy thud. She didn’t move. The eighty-thousand-dollar wedding gown, the dress I had painstakingly repaired twice, was now a shroud.
“Get down!” Luca roared, tackling me to the roof just as a second gunshot cracked through the air.
The bullet sparked against the brick parapet inches from my head, showering us in sharp dust. I screamed, covering my head with my arms.
Luca rolled, pulling me behind the heavy industrial HVAC unit that hummed in the center of the roof. We were pinned. The garage roof offered zero cover, and Julian had the high ground from the mansion’s third-floor balcony.
“Are you hit?” Luca demanded, his hands quickly checking my arms and back, his dark eyes wide with terror—not for himself, but for me.
“No, I’m okay,” I gasped, my chest heaving. “How did he get a rifle? How did he escape?”
“He must have had men waiting at the warehouse,” Luca cursed, pulling his own handgun from his waistband. He checked the magazine. Four bullets left. He was outgunned, pinned down, and Julian had a scope.
“Luca!” Julian’s voice echoed across the frozen courtyard, amplified by the sheer silence of the estate. “You should have died in the explosion! It would have been cleaner! Now I have to do this the hard way!”
“You just shot your own wife!” Luca shouted back, keeping his head down.
A cruel laugh drifted from the balcony. “She was a liability! She was about to tell you the truth! And we can’t have that, can we?”
“Who killed my brother, Julian?!” Luca yelled, the grief and rage tearing his voice apart.
“You really want to know?” Julian called back. “You want to know who gave the order to assassinate the great heir of the Moretti family? It wasn’t a rival family, Luca! It wasn’t the Chicago syndicate!”
Julian paused, letting the silence stretch tightly across the distance between them.
“It was your father, Luca!” Julian screamed, his voice dripping with sick triumph. “Your own father ordered the hit! He thought your brother was too soft to run the family! He paid me to set it up!”
The breath left Luca’s lungs. He slumped against the metal siding of the HVAC unit, his face turning an ashen, sickly gray. The gun in his hand trembled. His entire world—his loyalty to his late father, the empire he inherited, the years of mourning—was a lie. His family was built on fratricide.
I watched the most feared man in Chicago break apart right in front of me.
“Luca,” I whispered, reaching out to touch his arm. “Don’t listen to him. He’s trying to mess with your head so you’ll make a mistake.”
Luca didn’t seem to hear me. His eyes were vacant, staring at the cold tar beneath us. He was giving up.
Crack!
A third bullet slammed into the metal unit, inches from Luca’s shoulder.
“I’m going to pick you off, Luca!” Julian taunted. “And then I’m going to find the boy and finish what your father started!”
The mention of Leo shattered Luca’s paralysis. The vacant look in his eyes vanished, replaced by a cold, terrifying clarity. He looked at me, his jaw clenching.
“He’s not touching my nephew,” Luca swore.
He took off his suit vest, leaving him in his white dress shirt. “Sophie, listen to me. I’m going to throw my vest to the left. When he fires at it, I’ll pop out to the right and return fire. I only have a few shots. If I don’t hit him… you run for the fire escape. Don’t wait for me.”
“No,” I said, grabbing his wrist. “You can’t do that. It’s a suicide mission. He has a scope, he’ll see it’s a trick!”
“I don’t have a choice!” Luca fired back.
I looked around the roof, my mind racing. I wasn’t a mobster. I didn’t know how to shoot a gun. But I knew fabrics. I knew tension. I knew how things were built.
My eyes landed on Vanessa’s body. Specifically, the massive, billowing skirt of her wedding gown. She had ripped off the tulle, but the heavy silk train was still attached to her waist.
“I have an idea,” I said, my heart pounding so fast I thought it might burst. “But you have to trust me.”
Luca stared at me. “What are you going to do?”
“Give me your lighter.”
He hesitated, then pulled the silver Zippo from his pocket and handed it to me.
I crawled on my belly, staying completely flat, inching my way toward Vanessa’s body. The wind was howling, blowing directly from our roof toward the mansion balcony.
When I reached Vanessa, I grabbed the heavy, ten-foot silk train of her dress. Using the sharp sewing shears I always kept in my apron pocket, I hacked the fabric away from the corset.
I dragged the massive swath of silk back behind the HVAC unit.
“What is that going to do?” Luca asked.
“Silk is highly flammable,” I said, my hands shaking as I bunched the fabric together. “And when it burns, it creates a massive amount of thick, black smoke. The wind is blowing directly into his face. We’re going to blind him.”
I flicked the Zippo open. The flame caught the edge of the silk. In seconds, the fabric went up like a torch. The fire consumed the expensive material, and immediately, a huge, billowing cloud of acrid black smoke launched into the air, carried by the wind straight toward the mansion balcony.
Julian started coughing. “What the hell—”
The smoke completely obscured his line of sight. He fired blindly into the dark. Crack! Crack!
“Now!” I screamed.
Luca stepped out from behind the unit. He didn’t hesitate. He raised his handgun, squinted through the smoke, and fired three rapid shots at the muzzle flash on the balcony.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
We waited. The wind whipped the smoke away.
On the balcony, Julian Rossi stood frozen for a second. The hunting rifle slipped from his hands, clattering over the railing and crashing onto the patio below. Julian slumped forward, collapsing over the stone balustrade, lifeless.
It was over.
Luca lowered his gun, breathing heavily. He turned to me. His face was covered in soot, his shirt stained with dirt, but his eyes were so fiercely alive.
In the distance, the wailing siren of police cars began to echo through the trees. Luca’s loyal guards must have called them when the gunfight started.
Luca walked over to me. He didn’t say a word. He just dropped to his knees, pulled me into his chest, and held me tightly against him. I buried my face in his shoulder, finally letting the tears fall.
“You saved my life,” Luca whispered into my hair. “You saved my family.”
May you like
“We have to go get Leo,” I cried softly.
Luca pulled back, cupping my dirt-streaked face in his hands. “We will. But first, there’s one more thing you need to know about that dress.”
