Chapter 38 - The Altar of Wolves
Dante vaulted onto the iron ladder, moving with a speed that defied human anatomy.
He didn't fire from the hip; he moved directly into the steam. The two guards blind-fired into the fog, their bullets striking the iron drums below in showers of sparks, but Dante appeared beside the first man like an avenging demon emerging from the underworld.
Dante caught the barrel of the first guard’s rifle, wrenching the steel upward with a brutal twist that snapped both of the man’s wrists. In the same motion, Dante drove his combat blade upward, beneath the edge of the man’s tactical helmet, ending his life before he hit the grated floor.
The second guard swung around, but Dante seized him by the throat, using the man’s body as a human shield against Marco’s wild, panicked shots.
*Crack! Crack! Crack!*
Marco emptied his magazine into his own guard’s back.
*Click. Click.* The slide of Marco’s pistol locked back, empty.
The fog cleared slightly.
Marco stood alone on the platform, his back pressed against the rusted iron railing, his eyes wide in absolute, soul-crushing terror.
Dante dropped the dead guard. He stepped forward, his trench coat billowing, his face drenched in rain, soot, and blood.
Sofia was crying hysterically, pulling against the zip-ties, but her eyes never left her father.
"Wait... please, Dante, please!" Marco sobbed, dropping the empty gun, holding up his hands. "It was Salvatore! He told me—"
Dante didn't let him finish.
He stepped inside Marco’s reach, grabbed the front of his vest, and lifted the two-hundred-pound man off his feet with both arms. With a single, savage heave, Dante hurled him over the iron railing.
Marco fell twenty feet through the air, crashing through an industrial glass table on the warehouse floor below with a sickening crunch of bone and iron. He did not move again.
Dante turned instantly.
He fell to his knees in front of Sofia’s chair. His hands, which had just butchered two men with remorseless precision, became impossibly gentle.
With a single slice of his blade, he severed the zip-ties binding her wrists and ankles. He reached forward and delicately peeled the duct tape from her mouth, pulling it slowly so as not to tear her tender skin.
The moment the tape was gone, Sofia threw her small, trembling arms around Dante’s neck, burying her face into his blood-soaked collar.
*"Papa!"* she shrieked, the dam finally breaking, weeping with raw, shuddering gasps. *"Papa, you came! You found me!"*
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Dante buried his face in her dark curls. For the first time in his life, the dreaded Blackwood was shaking. His eyes squeezed shut, a single tear cutting through the soot on his cheek. "I’m here, my little star. Papa is here. You’re safe."
***
