Chapter 5 - The Iron Poker and the Second Man
The footsteps on the wooden stairs paused on the landing just outside the archive door. A thick cloud of dust drifted down through the air shaft as a heavy shoulder slammed against the exterior wood, testing the latch.
"Hey! Open up!" a gruff voice barked from the dark corridor. It wasn't Marco’s voice, and it certainly wasn't Lorenzo's. It was a flat, grating Brooklyn accent that smelled of cheap cigars and prison yards—one of the cleaning crew Marco had hired from the docks to tie up loose ends.
Inside the archive room, Sophia gripped the heavy iron poker tighter, her knuckles turning white. She positioned herself behind the heavy oak doorframe, her breathing slow and controlled, just like her husband Tomas used to do before he climbed the scaffolding on high-rise jobs in Astoria.
Trust your footing. Keep your center of gravity low.
Vincent watched her from the floor, his expression a mix of sheer disbelief and reluctant admiration. For eleven years, he had looked at Sophia as part of the estate’s furniture—quiet, invisible, useful only for folding linen and cleaning silver. He had never imagined there was iron beneath that soft cotton house robe.
"Kick it on three," the voice outside muttered.
One. Two.
The door burst inward with a splintering crash, the iron latch tearing straight out of the rotting pine frame. A bulky man in a black leather jacket stepped through the threshold, holding a suppressed 9mm Beretta chest-high, his eyes scanning the dark room for movement.
He never saw the iron poker coming from behind the doorframe.
Sophia swung with all the accumulated frustration of three years of widowed silence, three years of scrubbing floors in a house built on blood money, and three years of protecting a little girl in the shadows of giants. The heavy iron head caught the intruder squarely beneath his jawline with a sickening crack.
The man’s eyes rolled back into his head before his boots even left the floor. He dropped like a sack of wet cement, his Beretta skittering across the stone flags and coming to a rest right against Emma’s little yellow-duck slipper.
Emma looked down at the gun, picked it up by the barrel with two fingers as if it were a dirty toy, and handed it to Sophia without looking up from her cracker box.
"Here, Mama. You dropped your metal stick."
Sophia took the pistol with a shaky hand, her chest heaving as she stared down at the unconscious man bleeding on the doorway. "Good girl, Em. Now stay back by the blankets."
Vincent let out a ragged laugh from the floor, blood trickling down his chin. "Well I'll be damned, Sophia. You've got more backbone than half the soldiers in the family."
"Shut up, Vincent, and tell me how to get this wood off your leg," Sophia snapped, dropping the poker and rushing over to the heavy oak crate pinning his limb. "If there's one of them outside, there's more in the courtyard."
"Use the lever," Vincent grunted, pointing to a rusted iron crowbar leaning against the wine racks. "Wedge it under the bottom slat and heave upward. On three."
Sophia grabbed the crowbar, jammed the flat end beneath the splintered wood, and threw her entire body weight against the iron shaft. Muscles strained in her shoulders and back as the wood groaned, protesting against the ancient nails. With a sharp, explosive snap, the crate lifted just four inches—enough.
Vincent didn't hesitate. With a feral grunt of pain, he yanked his twisted leg free from beneath the crushing weight, dragging himself across the floor until his back hit the cold stone wall beside Emma.
"We have to move," Vincent said, pulling himself up by gripping the edge of a wine shelf, his face drained of all color. "If Marco realizes this one didn't check back in over the radio, he'll send the rest of the crew through the front gates."
"We're not running, Vincent," a cold, clipped voice echoed from the shattered doorway.
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Both adults froze.
Standing in the broken frame, silhouette framed by the harsh fluorescent light of the hallway, stood Marco Bruno. His clothes were still stained with the blood from the Ridgewood basement, and in his right hand, he held a heavy nickel-plated Colt .45 pointed directly at Sophia’s chest.
