Chapter 5 Leone
Chapter Five: Leone
The compound screams.
Not the building—the people inside it. Orders ricocheting off walls, boots pounding concrete, the metallic sound of magazines slamming into receivers. I move through the corridor at a dead sprint, Carmelo two steps behind me, both of us geared up and running hot.
“How many?” I bark into the comm.
Claudio’s voice comes back tight, controlled. “Three vehicles. East gate. Maybe fifteen, twenty shooters. They’ve already breached the outer fence.”
Twenty. That’s not a raiding party. That’s a war.
I round the corner into the main staging area. Six of our soldiers are already kitted up—vests, rifles, earpieces. Emilio stands at the front, cracking his neck, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a boxer waiting for the bell. His eyes are lit up.
The bastard loves this.
“Twins, you’re with me on the east corridor,” I say, grabbing a tactical vest from the rack and strapping it over my chest. “Carmelo, take Sandro and two others and cover the south entrance. They’ll try to flank.”
“They always try to flank,” Carmelo grunts, checking his shotgun.
“Which is why you’ll be there to welcome them.” I pull my Sig, chamber a round, then grab an MP5 from the wall and sling it across my back. Overkill, sure. But the Castillo’s aren’t sending amateurs tonight.
Emilio grins at me, all teeth. “About fucking time. I was starting to get bored.”
“Save it for the bodies.” I push past him and head for the east wing.
The compound is a fortress. Aurelio designed it that way. Three-foot concrete walls, reinforced doors, ballistic glass on every window. But a fortress is only as strong as the men defending it, and right now my men are spread thin across four floors and half a mile of perimeter.
Renzo’s betrayal cut deep. Our enemy knows our rotations, our weak points, our blind spots.
Fourteen months of intel, bleeding out like an open wound.
I should’ve caught it sooner. Should’ve seen the signs.
Instead, it took a civilian with a stack of shipping manifests to do what my entire intelligence operation couldn’t.
My mind drifts to Alexandra, sealed in the panic room three floors below my feet, and fear twists behind my ribs.
Focus.
We reach the east corridor. Through the ballistic glass, I can see the courtyard, floodlights cutting white arcs across the rain, shadows moving fast between parked vehicles. The Castillo’s came in three black SUVs, doors flung open, men pouring out like roaches.
“Positions,” I say.
Claudio takes the far window, settling his rifle against the sill with the calm of a man sitting down to dinner. Emilio kicks open a side door and drops to a knee, handgun up, grinning into the dark.
I take center, pressing my shoulder against the wall and sighting through the scope of the MP5.
The first wave hits the east entrance.
They come fast. Six men in tactical gear, moving in pairs, covering each other with practiced efficiency. These aren’t Castillo street soldiers. These are mercenaries. Hired guns with real training and no loyalty to anything except the paycheck.
Castillo spent money on this.
Good. That means he’s desperate.
“Wait,” I murmur into the comm. “Let them stack.”
The mercs reach the door and fan out, two of them working on the lock while the others provide cover.
“Now.”
Claudio moves to a vantage point and fires first. The shot drops the lead merc like a puppet with cut strings.
Before the body hits the ground, I’m firing—controlled bursts, three rounds each, walking the shots across the formation.
Two more go down. A fourth staggers sideways, clutching his vest where the round didn’t penetrate but the impact would have cracked a rib.
Emilio doesn’t wait for clean shots. He’s through the side door and into the courtyard before I can stop him, moving low and fast, firing as he goes. A merc swings toward him and Emilio puts two rounds in his throat without slowing down.
“Emilio!” I snap. “Get back inside!”
“Make me!”
Crazy son of a bitch.
I push through the door after him, covering his advance. The rain hits me like needles, cold and relentless. A muzzle flash erupts to my left and I pivot, firing blind, hearing the round ping off metal and then a grunt, a body falling.
The courtyard becomes a kill box.
Our men on the south entrance engage simultaneously.
Carmelo’s shotgun booms, the distinct rhythm of Sandro’s pistol is like music to my ears.
The Castillo mercs are caught between two firing lines, and they know it.
Some try to fall back to the vehicles. Others push forward, gambling on breaching the compound.
Neither works.
I move through chaos the way I was trained. Low, fast, efficient. Each target gets assessed in a fraction of a second: threat level, distance, angle. I fire only when I’m certain. Every round finds flesh.
A merc comes around the corner of an SUV and nearly takes my head off. The round buzzes past my ear, close enough to feel the heat. I drop to a knee and return fire two shots, center mass. He drops.
My heart is hammering but my hands are steady. This is the part of me that never shakes, never hesitates, never questions. The weapon Aurelio built from a thirteen-year-old boy with blood on his hands and nothing left to lose.
Claudio’s voice crackles through the comm. “Second wave incoming. West side.”
Shit. “How many?”
“Eight. Maybe ten. They’re hitting the service entrance.”
“Carmelo, redirect to west. Sandro, hold south.” I grab Emilio by the back of his vest as he passes. “You. With me. Now.”
He wipes blood off his chin and follows without argument.
We cut through the interior, boots echoing off concrete. The compound’s hallways are a maze designed to slow invaders, but I’ve walked them ten thousand times. I could navigate blind.
My mind splits: one half tracking the battle, the other half counting floors. Three levels above the panic room. If they breach the west side, they’ll have access to the lower corridors. They could reach her.
I move faster.
We hit the west service entrance as the second wave breaches. The door blows inward and three mercs pour through the smoke. I fire before they clear the threshold. The first one drops. The second stumbles sideways, and Emilio finishes him with a shot that makes a mess of the wall.
The third gets a round off. It catches Emilio in the vest, knocking him back a step. He snarls and shoots the man twice in the face.
“You hit?” I ask without looking.
“Bruise.” He rolls his shoulder. “Might cry about it later.”
More shapes in the smoke. I press against the wall and let them come. One. Two. I drop both with short, efficient bursts. Claudio appears behind them, clearing the hallway with his rifle, each shot precise enough to be surgical.
“That’s the last of the west wave,” he says, stepping over a body.
“Confirm?”
He checks his scope, scanning the service entrance. “Clear.”
The gunfire outside is thinning. Sporadic now, not concentrated. The fight is dying, and it’s dying in our favor.
I click the comm. “All teams, report.”
Carmelo shouts, “South clear. Four down.”
Sandro chimes in, “Perimeter holding. No additional contacts.”
Renzo’s replacement, a soldier named Dante: “East gate secure. We’ve got bodies.”
I lean against the wall and let myself breathe. Once. Twice. The adrenaline is still burning, but the danger has passed.
“Casualties?” I ask.
Claudio checks his feed. “Two of ours wounded. None critical. They lost—” He pauses, counting. “Seventeen. Maybe eighteen.”
Eighteen men. Marco Castillo sent eighteen mercenaries to hit our compound, and every single one of them is dead or bleeding out on our concrete.
The message has been sent. And the reply is written in their blood.
I find her exactly where I left her.
The panic room door opens with a hydraulic hiss, and Alexandra is standing in the center of the room, fists balled at her sides, breathing hard. She’s not crying. Not curled in a corner. She’s on her feet, eyes wild, every muscle coiled like she was ready to fight whoever came through that door.
When she sees it’s me, a flood breaks in her expression. Not tears. Something deeper. Relief so raw it looks like pain.
“You’re alive,” she says.
“I’m alive.”
She stares at me. I stare back. I’m covered in rain and sweat and someone else’s blood. My vest has two impact marks where rounds hit kevlar. My hands are still shaking from the adrenaline.
“Are you hurt?” she asks, her voice cracking on the second word.
“No.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying.”
She crosses the distance between us in three steps and grabs the front of my vest, pulling me down to her level. Her eyes search my face, my neck, my arms—checking for wounds, for damage, for any sign that I’m bleeding.
“Stop,” I say.
She doesn’t stop, undoing my vest and eyeing me down. Her hands run along my ribs, my shoulders, pressing hard enough to check for broken bones. When she’s satisfied, she steps back, still gripping my open vest, and lets out a breath that sounds like it’s been trapped in her chest since I left.
“Eighteen men,” I say. “The Castillo’s sent eighteen men. They’re all down.”
“I don’t care about eighteen men.” Her voice is sharp, almost angry. “I care about whether you walked back through that door.”
I open my mouth to say something—what, I don’t know. Something dismissive. Something that puts distance back between us. Something that rebuilds the wall she keeps tearing down.
Instead, I put my hand on the back of her neck and pull her close.
She comes willingly, pressing her face against my chest. I feel her breathing, fast at first, then slower, steadying against me. My chin rests on the top of her head. She’s shaking. Or maybe I am. It’s hard to tell where she ends and I start.
We stand like that for a long time. Long enough for my heartbeat to slow. Long enough for the adrenaline to drain, replaced by a feeling building quieter and infinitely more dangerous.