Chapter 14 Matteo
Chapter Fourteen: Matteo
The compound becomes a warzone in under ninety seconds.
Leone leads us through the corridor at a run, barking orders into his radio, and everyone flies into action. Soldiers materialize from rooms and stairwells, armed, armored, moving to assigned positions.
The explosions continue outside. They’re hitting the eastern wall in a pattern designed to create multiple breach points simultaneously, spreading the defensive line thin enough that an assault force can push through before the gaps are filled.
It's a good plan. They designed it knowing the compound's layout. That means Marco didn't improvise this. He planned it before we were sitting in his office asking for a signature, and the refusal wasn't a decision. It was a delay tactic to keep us in place while his soldiers moved into position.
The son of a bitch set us up… he knew we knew and were coming.
"Eastern breach is primary," Leone says, stopping at the junction where the main corridor splits into the east and west wings. "Claudio has the west. Carmelo is already at the eastern wall. Emilio is getting Savannah, Charlotte, Gia, and Alexandra to the safe room." He looks at me. "Can you fight?"
"Not trained, but I can hurt people."
"That'll do. Antonia?"
She's beside me. The dark red dress is now cut short, and Vita and Morte are in her hands, the curved blades catching the red emergency lighting.
The wedding ring sits pretty on her finger.
She looks like something out of a fever dream, a bride armed for war, and the look on her face is the one I saw in the gym when she corrected the X-slash for the first time, focused and lethal and completely in her element.
"Give me the eastern breach," she says. "Those are Castillo soldiers. They know me. They know the blades. Half of them will hesitate when they see me, and hesitation is all I need."
"They're your father's men."
"They were my father's men. Now they're targets."
Leone nods. "Eastern breach. Both of you. Support Carmelo. Hold the corridor until I can redirect soldiers from the western positions."
We run. The eastern corridor is long, concrete, also lit by the red emergency strips that make everything look like it's already bleeding.
Gunfire echoes from ahead, multiple weapons, the staccato of automatic fire mixed with the heavier, slower shotguns.
The sounds bounce off the walls and overlay each other until the corridor is one continuous roar.
Carmelo is at the breach.
The eastern wall has a hole in it, a ragged gap where the explosives punched through the concrete, wide enough for two men to come through shoulder to shoulder.
Carmelo is positioned behind a support column ten feet from the gap, his gun in one hand and his knife in the other, and the floor around him tells the story of the last three minutes.
Two Castillo soldiers are down, one face-first, the other on his back with his eyes open and a wound across his throat that Carmelo's knife put there.
A third soldier comes through the breach. Carmelo shoots him in the chest without changing expression. The man drops and a fourth appears behind him and Carmelo fires again, but the shot goes wide as the soldier dives behind a stack of supply crates that were stored in the corridor.
"Two more outside," Carmelo says as we reach him. "Covering fire from a vehicle beyond the wall. The breach team is six from what I can see, two down, one behind cover, three outside."
"I'll take the one behind cover," Antonia says. She's already moving, a ball of rage and fury. She moves along the wall toward the supply crates with the fluid, silent speed of a woman who was trained for close-quarters combat since she was a child.
The soldier behind the crates sees her coming. He raises his gun and the recognition hits his face a half-second before Antonia hits his body. He knows her and the hesitation costs him.
She drops below his gun, spins, and the X-slash opens his forearm from wrist to elbow. He screams and the weapon falls and Antonia follows the X with a reverse strike that takes him across the collarbone where the vest doesn’t cover, and he goes down, alive but out of the fight.
She didn't kill him. She could have. The X at full power would have opened his throat. Instead she disabled him, because these are men she grew up with and the line between enemy combatant and former colleague is one she's drawing in real time with every strike.
I grab the fallen soldier's weapon and tell him to stay down or I’ll finish him.
An automatic rifle, heavier than anything I've handled, but the mechanism is simple and the part of my brain that spent years preparing for this world understands the basics.
Safety off. Stock against shoulder. Point at the thing you want to stop existing.
More soldiers come through the breach. Not one at a time now. Three together, weapons up, professional entry technique, covering each other's angles. They fire as they come through and the rounds hit concrete and metal and the air fills with dust and the sound of impact.
Carmelo shoots the first one. I shoot at the second and miss because this is not my forte, but I’ll be damned if I don’t try. I fire again. This time the round catches the second soldier in the leg, and he stumbles and Carmelo finishes him with a shot that drops him clean.
The third soldier has his weapon aimed at Antonia. She's exposed, mid-corridor, two feet from the crate where the first man fell, and the soldier's barrel is tracking her, and his finger is on the trigger and the math between his muzzle velocity and her position doesn't give her time to move.
I don't think. I step out from behind the column and fire three rounds in the soldier's direction. Two miss. One hits his vest and the impact staggers him backward, not a kill, not even a wound through the armor, but enough to break his aim for the two seconds Antonia needs to close the distance.
She reaches him before he recovers. Vita goes through the gap between his vest and his collar, a targeted strike that avoids the armor and finds the shoulder joint underneath.
He drops his weapon. Morte follows, slashing across his gun hand, and he's down, clutching two wounds, too damaged to get back up.
The breach is quiet. The covering fire from outside has stopped. Through the gap in the wall I can see the vehicle pulling back, tires spinning on gravel, and the remaining Castillo soldiers retreating toward the tree line.
Carmelo steps over the bodies and looks through the gap, watching the vehicle disappear. He turns back to us, and his eyes move from Antonia to me and back, and the assessment he runs takes about two seconds.
"You shoot wide," he says to me.
"I know."
"Stop jerking the trigger. Squeeze. Like it’s a puppy."
"You squeeze puppies?" The fuck?
“Like you’re petting a puppy, but squeezing the trigger. Fuck, don’t be an idiot.” He looks at Antonia. "You didn't kill them.”
"They're Castillo soldiers. They followed orders. The orders were wrong, but the men don't deserve to die for Marco's decisions."
Carmelo considers this and nods. Then he walks past us down the corridor toward the western wing because the fight isn't over. Antonia and I stand in the breach corridor with wounded soldiers groaning on the floor.
She's breathing hard. There’s blood on Vita that isn't hers and blood on her forearm from a cut she took sometime during the fight that I didn't see happen.
The wedding ring is still on her finger and the karambits are still in her hands and she's standing in the wreckage of her father's assault looking like the most terrifying woman I've ever seen.
Terrifying and beautiful.
"You shot at a man for me," she says.
"I shot wide, so I tried to shoot a man for you."
"You stepped out from behind cover and drew fire to give me time. That's not shooting wide. That's covering someone."
"I told you I'm not trained."
"You don't need training for that." She looks at me and the fury in her face has shifted. It's still there, still hot, still aimed, but it's not aimed at me anymore and it hasn't been for days. "That's instinct. You covered me because your body moved before your brain could stop it."
"My body has been doing that since the corridor."
She breaks into the most breathtaking grin I’ve ever seen. I’m about to step in, to kiss her, to fuck her, to do something to her that I shouldn’t when the radio crackles.
Leone's voice. "Eastern breach status."
I pick up the radio. "Breach contained. Six hostiles, all down, three wounded. Carmelo moving to support western positions. Antonia and I are holding the eastern corridor in case they come back."
"Hold it. Reinforcements in five, keep those alive, alive. We need hostages."
I set the radio down. Antonia sheaths Morte and keeps Vita out, the blade resting against her thigh, blood drying on the curved edge. She looks at the gap in the wall, at the courtyard beyond it, at the tree line where the Castillo vehicles retreated.
"He's out there," she says. "Marco. He wouldn't send soldiers without being close enough to direct the operation. He's in one of those vehicles or he's in a command position behind the tree line."
"You want to go after him."
"I want to end this… not the battle. The war. Marco won't stop sending men until someone stops him, and the someone needs to be me because he won't listen to anyone else and even if he doesn't listen to me, he'll have to look his daughter in the face while she tells him it's over."
"You told him that yesterday."
"Yesterday I told him with words. Tonight I'll tell him with Vita and Morte."
The reinforcements arrive. Four Bonaccorso soldiers, armed, positioning themselves at the breach and two more dragging the bodies to medical. The corridor is secured. The eastern wall will need repair, but the immediate threat is contained.
Leone's voice on the radio again. "Western breach repelled. Claudio holding. Compound secure for now. Castillo forces pulling back to the tree line. They're regrouping, not retreating."
Antonia takes the radio. "Leone. I need to go outside."
"Negative. The perimeter is hostile."
"My father is out there. If I go to him, the soldiers stop. They're following his orders. If I take him out of the equation, the orders stop and the soldiers stand down."
Silence on the radio.
"Carmelo goes with you," Leone says.
“I’m going too.” I say.
“You’re a liability, Matteo.”
“That’s my fucking WIFE, and I’m going.”
She nods as Leone sighs and gives in.
We move toward the breach, through the gap in the wall, toward the courtyard.
Somewhere beyond it, Marco Castillo is sitting in a vehicle giving orders that are killing people, and his daughter is walking toward him in a blood-stained wedding dress with two karambits and a husband who just learned how to cover fire.