Chapter 3 - The Symphony Ticket
~1,100 words
Dominico pushed Clara behind the heavy steel doorframe of Sophia’s room.
“Stay down,” he commanded, drawing the sleek 9mm Beretta from his shoulder holster.
The red emergency lights cast long, bloody shadows across the hallway. Mateo was walking slowly, his gun drawn, flanked by two of his loyal soldiers. These were men who had eaten at Dominico’s table, men who had kissed Sophia’s cheek at their wedding.
“You shouldn’t have lied to me on the phone, boss,” Mateo called out, his voice echoing in the quiet ward. “It hurts my feelings.”
Dominico checked the chamber of his weapon. “You’re a dead man, Mateo. You just haven’t stopped breathing yet.”
“Maybe,” Mateo chuckled. “But I’m not the one whose wife is tethered to a wall plug. Give me the coat, Dominico. Give me what she took from the symphony, and I’ll walk away. I’ll let you and the little bastard in the incubator live.”
Dominico’s eyes narrowed. The symphony ticket.
Sophia hadn’t just been running. She had stolen something from Mateo. Something worth killing over.
Dominico leaned around the doorframe and fired twice.
The deafening cracks shattered the sterile silence of the hospital. One of Mateo’s men dropped, clutching a shattered kneecap, screaming in agony. Mateo and the other man scrambled behind a heavy nursing cart, returning fire.
Bullets chewed through the drywall just inches from Sophia’s bed.
“Luca!” Dominico roared into his headset. “Stairwell B, fourth floor! Now!”
Before Mateo could fire again, the heavy fire doors at the opposite end of the hall burst open. Luca and four heavily armed Rossi loyalists flooded the corridor, their weapons raised.
“Drop it!” Luca bellowed.
Mateo looked over his shoulder. Outgunned and outmaneuvered. He cursed, firing wildly to lay down cover fire as he and his remaining soldier bolted for the service elevators.
Luca’s men gave chase, but the elevator doors slid shut just as bullets sparked against the steel.
“Boss, are you hit?” Luca asked, sprinting into the room.
“I’m fine,” Dominico said, his chest heaving, his eyes immediately going to Sophia. Her monitors were beeping steadily. The backup batteries had held.
He turned to Luca. “We are moving them. Right now. Call the private clinic in Evanston. I want a trauma team ready, an armored transport, and fifty of our best men locking down the perimeter.”
“And Mateo?”
“Put a bounty on his head. Two million dollars. I want him brought to me alive.”
Within thirty minutes, the hospital was swarming with Dominico’s men. Under the frantic supervision of Clara and the chief neonatologist, baby Leo was transferred into a portable, battery-powered transport incubator. Sophia was carefully moved onto a specialized gurney.
Dominico walked beside his son’s incubator as they loaded him into the back of a heavily armored ambulance. He looked down at the tiny boy fighting for every breath.
I will burn the city to the ground before I let anyone hurt you again, Dominico promised silently.
Once they were moving, the heavy steel doors of the ambulance locked shut. Dominico sat in the dim light, pulling the gold pocket watch and the symphony ticket from his pocket.
Number 404.
He looked at Luca, who was sitting across from him.
“The Chicago Symphony Orchestra,” Dominico said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “When was the last time anyone in our family went to a performance?”
Luca frowned, pulling up the master calendar on his tablet. “Your uncle Vincenzo hosts a charity gala there every July. In fact… the last one was July 14th.”
The exact day Sophia disappeared.
The day she was shot.
Dominico’s blood ran cold. Sophia hadn’t been meeting a lover. She had been at his Uncle Vincenzo’s charity gala.
“Take my car. Go to the symphony hall,” Dominico ordered Luca. “Bribe the cloakroom attendant, threaten the manager, do whatever it takes. Get whatever is in locker 404.”
Two hours later, Sophia and Leo were secured in the subterranean VIP wing of the Evanston clinic. Armed guards stood at every entrance.
Dominico sat in a leather chair beside Sophia’s bed, holding her hand, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest on the ventilator.
The heavy door opened, and Luca walked in. He looked pale.
He carried a heavy, leather-bound ledger.
“It was in a briefcase checked into the cloakroom under a fake name,” Luca said, setting it on the table. “Boss… you need to look at this.”
Dominico opened the ledger. It wasn’t a record of hits or illegal shipments. It was a financial log. Bank routing numbers, offshore accounts, wire transfers.
But it was the names attached to the accounts that made Dominico’s breath catch.
Every single legitimate business Dominico had built over the last ten years—the construction firms, the shipping ports, the real estate holding companies—had been quietly, systematically drained. Millions of dollars siphoned away into shadow accounts.
And the authorizing signature on every transfer was his own. Forged, but perfect.
“Someone is bankrupting you, boss,” Luca whispered. “And setting you up for federal tax evasion.”
Dominico turned to the final page. Taped to the inside cover was a photograph.
It was a picture of Mateo. But he wasn’t standing with mafia soldiers. He was standing on a yacht, clinking champagne glasses with a man Dominico trusted implicitly.
Dominico’s Uncle Vincenzo.
The man who had raised him after his father died.
Dominico stared at the photo. His uncle and his best friend. They were working together. They had stolen his empire, and when Sophia had discovered the ledger at the gala, they had tried to murder her.
“Boss,” Luca said urgently, touching his earpiece. “We have a problem.”
“What?”
“Mateo just sent a broadcast to our encrypted channel. He wants to talk.”
Dominico grabbed the radio from Luca. “Mateo. You’re a dead man walking.”
Mateo’s laugh crackled through the speaker. “Maybe. But I’m not walking alone, Dominico.”
“What do you mean?”
“You moved your wife and the rat-baby,” Mateo sneered. “But you left someone behind in the rush. Someone who helped you.”
A muffled, terrified cry came through the speaker. A woman’s voice.
May you like
It was Clara. The nurse who had saved his son.
“Bring me the ledger, Dominico,” Mateo said coldly. “Or I’ll send the nurse back to you in pieces.”
