Chapter 7 - The Counterstrike
"Right here," I said, stepping into the doorway.
Every gun in the room snapped toward me. Marcus turned, his eyes bulging with manic rage.
"You," Marcus sneered. "I should have put a bullet in your head the second you spilled that glass."
"You could have," I said, raising my empty hands slowly, keeping my coat open just enough to show I wasn't carrying a firearm. "But then you’d never know what I did with the laboratory results."
Marcus frowned, his finger tightening slightly on the trigger. "What results?"
"The Providence lab," I said clearly, staring straight into his eyes. "Batch 904-B. The heavy metal neurotoxin you used to blind Gideon. The same toxin you used to assassinate Alderman Hayes two years ago. I just sent the complete mass spectrometry analysis, along with the chain-of-custody transfer records, to the Federal Prosecutor’s office and the heads of the other four crime families in New England."
Marcus went completely rigid. "You're lying."
"Check your phone, Marcus," I said coldly. "The Falcone family doesn't take kindly to an underboss poisoning his own bloodline to seize control. In our world, disloyalty to family is an automatic death warrant."
Right on cue, Marcus’s phone began to vibrate violently on the desk.
One of his gunmen flinched, glancing toward the phone, then toward Marcus. In that split-second of hesitation, Gideon moved.
He didn't need to see clearly. He knew every inch of his own room, every sound, every breath. With a violent wrench of his massive frame, Gideon snapped the plastic zip-ties against the metal rivets of the chair arm—he had deliberately kept them loose when they bound him.
In a single, fluid explosion of violence, Gideon lunged forward, grabbed Marcus’s gun wrist, and snapped the bone like dry kindling.
Marcus shrieked as his gun clattered to the carpet.
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The two guards opened fire, but Gideon used Marcus as a human shield, taking cover behind the desk as bullets tore through the mahogany wood and shattered the antique books lining the shelves.
"Maya, get down!" Gideon roared.
