Chapter 2 - The Charge Through the Breaches
Bruno did not stay at the window. The dog understood the geography of the stone cottage with lethal tactical comprehension. The glass was barred with decorative iron grilles; the path to the throat lay through the front door.
With a deep, guttural snarl that shook the glassware on the bedside table, the Cane Corso turned on his hocks, his heavy claws gouging deep parallel furrows into the polyurethane finish of the floorboards. He hit the bedroom doorframe at a dead sprint, his shoulder knocking the pine casing so hard the plaster cracked, and barreled straight through the cottage’s narrow sitting room.
The exterior door—a heavy oak panel with a brass lever latch—had been pulled shut, but not deadbolted. Bruno struck the wood at full mass. The latch mechanism sheared with a sharp metallic snap, the heavy door swinging outward and slamming against the stone exterior with a concussive boom that echoed into the courtyard.
"Bruno, no! Heel!" Elena screamed, scrambling to her feet.
She turned to secure Sophie, but the child had already reacted with the frantic, irrational panic of a five-year-old who believes her protector is leaving her behind in the dark. Sophie slid out from beneath the blankets, her small bare feet slapping against the cold floor, clutching the stuffed rabbit against her chest with both hands.
"Bruno!" Sophie sobbed, sprinting out into the sitting room after the dog. "Don't let him get Bruno!"
"Sophie, stop!" Elena shouted, her heart leaping into her throat.
Elena lunged, but her fingers caught only empty air as Sophie dashed through the open doorway into the freezing night air.
The servants’ passage was an enclosed, barrel-vaulted stone breezeway constructed eighty years ago to allow kitchen staff and domestic maids to move between the service cottages and the manor’s lower cellars without being seen from the formal carriage loop. It was dimly lit by low-wattage iron sconces spaced every forty feet, casting sickly, flickering yellow pools across flags of uneven river slate.
Up ahead, thirty yards into the corridor, the massive black silhouette of the Cane Corso was a freight train of rage. His claws sounded like a burst of automatic gunfire against the slate: clack-clack-clack-clack. He was hunting a scent that was fresh, warm, and moving deeper toward the primary house.
Sophie ran through the drafty gallery, her pink flannel pajamas flapping around her ankles, her brown curls bouncing frantically. The stones were freezing beneath her small feet, but she didn't slow down. "Bruno! Come back!"
"Sophie, get back here right now!" Elena yelled, her breath ragged, sprinting down the corridor with all the desperate speed of a mother terrified of what lurked at the end of the passage.
The passage took a sharp, ninety-degree turn to the left, entering the foundation level of the main manor house. Here, the raw fieldstone gave way to older construction: interior partitioning made of thick, centuries-old black walnut paneling, salvaged from a dismantled manor in northern Italy and fitted into the subterranean foundations by Dante Moretti’s grandfather sixty years ago.
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The dog did not round the corner into the wine cellars.
He came to a screeching halt directly in front of a floor-to-ceiling expanse of ornately carved walnut.
