Fall Before Her Throne (The Shadows Syndicate #4)

1. Leona

LEONA

“They’re coming.”

Max’s voice was breathless and strained. His fingers clutched mine. He squeezed, once, a barely there pressure, before his grip went loose and his eyes rolled back in his head.

My heart lodged in my throat, pulsing a thunderous beat.

The world around me stuttered to a stop.

Max was here. Max was bleeding out on the doorstep of the penthouse. The perimeter alarm blared in the background while my men jumped into action around me. Someone was coming. Someone did this to him.

“Who is coming, Volpe?” Obi demanded from behind me—next to Cas—but Max didn’t respond. “Who?!”

“We know—we know who,” Ciel said tightly. I caught his careful look, his piercing blue eyes screaming the truth.

The Camorra.

They had come for Arion Vokshi, the Albanian who had escaped their grasp in Europe.

Max had killed him yesterday at The Obsidian, the club in Philadelphia we infiltrated with Fallon and the other girls.

He was supposed to meet with the Camorra today to get them to leave New York and return to Italy.

Clearly, that didn’t work. They turned on him. We should have expected this. We should have known he could never have convinced them to leave.

Now they were coming for us all.

Obi’s hand closed on the back of my neck, slipping underneath my mess of curls, sending a jolt down my spine. His chest rumbled with frustration. “We must move.”

I knew I should be leaping into action, grabbing any weapon I could find to defend our home, but I couldn’t look away.

The cut on Max’s side oozed sticky darkness down what used to be a white shirt.

Even more blood matted his hair to his right temple.

One of his eyes was swollen shut. His cheek looked like a balloon. Lacerations peppered his arms.

I stared at his chest, trying to see if it still drew breath.

“Cas,” I choked out, clutching my bodyguard’s shoulder.

Cas’s fingers went to Max’s neck. He blinked, eyes as wide as mine. “He has a pulse, but it’s weak.”

A breath gusted from my lips. Obi’s grip on my neck kept me steady, grounded.

I didn’t have time to think about the implications of the intense wave of relief coursing through my body.

My thoughts instantly refocused. Wynn, Ciel, and Ryu talked in the background, something about gathering weapons. Obi was right; we had to move.

“Grab him,” I said as I stood. “Bring him inside.”

Cas looped one arm under Max’s shoulders. “Ryu,” he called. “Grab his other arm.”

“The fuck? I’m not carrying that asshole,” Ryu scoffed while he peeked around the threshold, toward the empty hallway that we all knew was likely less than a minute away from an assault. The perimeter alarm still echoed inside the penthouse. “Let him bleed out. Who cares?”

“Ryu!” I snapped. “Please!”

“Fucking fine,” he grumbled, but he grabbed Max’s other side, and together they carried him back inside the penthouse hallway.

“Inside, Leona,” Obi ordered. “Now.”

“Wynn,” I shouted as I headed to the weapons closet. I strapped on my thigh sheaths, slipped on my knives, and shoved extra magazines of ammo for my Hellcat into my pockets. “Did you get a hold of Willow?”

“Not yet,” he answered. He held a phone between his ear and shoulder while he strapped on more weapons. Ciel tapped on his tablet, and the blaring alarm shut off.

“I’m ini—I’m initiating defense protocols,” Ciel said.

“Copy,” Obi said from the hallway.

“Shutters coming down!” Ryu’s voice carried from the kitchen. He and Cas must have taken Max there to get him out of the way.

“Where are they, Ciel?” Obi asked. Together, Wynn, Obi, and I looked over Ciel’s tablet at the camera feeds.

“Men coming up the el—elevator,” my hacker said.

“How many?”

“Seven,” Ciel responded. We followed him through the house until he grabbed the TV remote and flipped on the screen. It flickered for a second before a video of seven heavily armed men riding the elevator popped up. “One for each of us. Not too bad.”

The metal shutters on the penthouse windows rolled down until they clicked shut and locked into place. In the metallic darkness, the penthouse took on an eerie tint.

“Fucking hell,” Ryu spat as he and Cas deposited Max on the couch, tearing a heavy groan of pain from Max’s lips.

Groans of pain at least meant he was alive. For now.

“You okay?” Cas breathed heavily when he came to my side, running a palm down my arm. His blue eyes sparked with concern. Max’s blood splattered his clothes. I grabbed his hand before I recoiled at the feeling of warm wetness.

“Yeah.” I wiped Max’s blood on my pants while I glanced between him, Max, and the TV showing the men getting rapidly closer to our floor. Hold it together. “Ciel, can you kill power to the elevators?”

“In progress,” he answered before he hissed in frustration. “I need my computer. My hands aren’t—they aren’t as fast.”

Wynn followed him to his room, still with his phone to his ear while he talked with Willow.

A few moments later, Ciel shouted. “Done!”

On the video feed, the elevator came to an abrupt halt. The men inside jolted and then started prying open the doors. The power cut would only slow them down.

Who were they? And why did they seem like fucking special ops? These weren’t typical mafia soldiers. These were highly trained men. Assassins.

“Here,” Obi said, dropping six backpacks to the ground. “Go bags. Grab one before we leave.”

Ryu dropped to a knee and began rifling through one.

“We have to leave?” I asked. This was our home. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted those fuckers to go away.

“We’ll eliminate them, but we can’t stay here anymore.” Obi pressed a palm to my cheek. His voice was low, tinged with sadness but carrying the hard truth of reality. “We’re not safe here if they know where we live.”

I bit the inside of my lip and turned back to the TV. The elevator doors opened fifteen floors below us, and the assailants climbed out. The penthouse was far above most of the other residents in this building, but it wouldn’t be good if regular people got caught up in this.

“Fuck,” I whispered under my breath before turning to Obi. “Okay. What do we do?”

“Caspian, do you recognize any of them?” he asked.

Cas squinted at the TV. “No.”

Definitely the Camorra then—or at least hired by the Camorra. Cas would recognize if they were Giuseppe Sandrini’s men, Enzo Rossi’s, or Max’s. Cas knew everyone.

“How long until they reach our floor, Ciel?” Obi asked.

“A few minutes, maximum,” Ciel said as he rounded the corner. “They’re heading for the s—the stairs.”

He pressed another button on the remote. A matrix of different screens popped up, showing different camera angles from the stairwell. We watched as the men ran up floor by floor.

“We’re safe enough inside the penthouse,” Ryu said from the kitchen. He’d taken a few of the go bags and was shoveling food inside. Already, he’d strapped a half dozen more visible knives to his arms. They paired with the guns already strapped to his holsters. “We can wait them out.”

“Not if they have explosives,” Wynn said as he darted through the hallway. He pointed to the backpacks each of the intruders was carrying. This was more like a military operation. How the hell had Piero Greco organized this so fast? “Our defense measures are temporary.”

“They’ll work.” Ryu’s voice was infused with a confidence no one else felt.

Max groaned from the couch while his eyes scrunched together in pain. He rolled over and threw up all over the floor.

“Are you fucking serious?” Ryu complained before I shot him a death glare.

“Wynn?” I gritted my teeth and willed calm into my voice. “Any update from Willow? What do we do?”

We needed our own fucking doctor in this group with how often we got hurt.

Wynn rushed through the kitchen and into the living room, carrying our first aid kit. “Willow said field triage first. I’ll call her back once we’re safe.”

He dropped to his knees in front of Max and began rifling through the kit for bandages and gauze. If we could get him bandaged up, we could all get out of here.

“They’re approaching our floor,” Ciel said, watching the TV for a second before he ran to the last kitchen cabinet on the left, right above the switches that triggered our alarms and lowered the steel shutters.

“What are our defense measures?” I asked. “We go out there, guns blazing?”

That sounded like a great way to die.

Ryuji grinned. “Just watch.”

My eyes stayed glued to the TV while the camera angle switched to our hallway, showing a view of the entrance to the stairwell as well as our front door, which was now covered by a metal slab.

“The door is already reinforced, but that’s a bonus blast door,” Ryu said smugly as he saw me scoff. “Came from the ceiling. Cool, right?”

“The penthouse has turned into a bomb shelter,” I murmured. And Ciel still didn’t think we’d last against explosives?

The door to the stairwell burst open, but before the seven assailants could even step out, the first three fell one by one.

Pop. Pop. Pop. Bodies piled on top of one another.

The living men scrambled back inside, hiding behind the door.

As it slammed shut, I watched their forms press against the walls as if they were trying to dodge something.

My eyebrows furrowed. “Did they get shot? By who?”

Ciel grinned and held up a controller with a screen attached. “We have a g—we have a gun hidden in the wall across from the stairwell door. There’s one across from the elevator, too.”

“A remote-controlled gun? With a video game controller?”

“Neat, right? I made it myself.”

I snorted. “Yeah, that’s pretty neat, Ciel.”

He was about to say something else when we watched one man lean forward to shoot.

“Mierda.” Ciel tossed the controller back onto the counter. “Lucky shot. The gun is out.”

Four men hurried from the stairwell, automatic guns on their shoulders. We watched on the cameras as they got closer and closer to our door.

“What else?” I asked.

“The gun from the elevator?” Cas asked.

Ciel shook his head. “The angle is off.”

Two of the men crouched in front of the door and began pulling blocks of something from their backpacks. The other two provided backup cover, swiveling their guns between the door and then back to the elevator and the stairwell.

With a displeased sigh, Obi left the room, and I could hear his footsteps disappear inside the weapons closet, but my eyes were fixed on how they attached the blocks to the blast door, one by one.

“What are they doing?”

“That’s called C4, hanii,” Ryu said as he grabbed my shoulders and steered me to the other side of the couch. “It’s super fun.”

“They’re going to blow the fucking door open,” Cas grumbled.

“Yep.”

Together, they pushed me down to duck behind the couch.

Beside me, Wynn huffed a breath and wiped his forehead with the back of his arm. Bandages covered Max’s chest wound. “That’ll do for now. It’s clean, but he needs stitches.”

Max’s eyes flickered open, bleary and dazed. He grimaced in pain. “I shouldn’t…have come here.”

“No shit,” Ryu sneered. “You’ll get us all killed.”

Wynn stared at Max, suspicion turning his mouth down at the edges. Cas’s eyebrows drew together, and his fists clenched. Ryu’s jaw was set, a knife in his grip.

No one was happy about this. But here we were.

“Wynn!” Obi called from somewhere deeper in the penthouse.

“Coming!” He darted down the hallway. Ciel followed.

“If they are here for him, we should give him over,” Ryu said. On the TV, the men still planted the C4, but after they shoved some wires into the blocks, they backed away. My heartbeat tingled in my fingertips. “Maybe they’ll kill him and leave. We could fix all this mess before it gets any worse.”

I glanced back at Max. He stared back at me from the couch, with something like guilt in his eyes, while his hand pressed into the fresh bandages on his side.

We could turn him over, but the likelihood of the Camorra leaving was slim.

They’d taken the effort to come all this way from Italy, and we were fools for even hoping they’d turn around and leave.

They wanted what we had. They were assaulting my territory.

Max or not, I couldn’t fucking let that slide.

“No,” I said, my grip on my Hellcat tightening. “They’re fucking with us. We’re going to hit them back. Show them they made a mistake waltzing into this town and thinking they own it.”

“Hell yeah,” Cas said, a smile tugging at his lips.

Ryu grinned wickedly. “Now that I can get behind. That’s my girl.”

If the Camorra wanted New York, they’d have to take it from our cold, dead fingers.