THE CHEST FULL OF LEAD WEIGHTS

Luca let go of my waist and stepped toward Daniel.

He took the wet piece of paper.

It was a piece of heavy, expensive stationery, the kind Frank Marino used for his insurance quotes. But the handwriting was rushed, panicked.

Luca read it aloud in the quiet dining room.

“Luca. By the time you read this, I’ll be out of the city. Falcone knows the plan failed. He knows Marco is blown. They’re coming for the rosary tonight. Southside Brokers. Midnight.”

Luca lowered the paper.

I looked at the grandfather clock in the hallway.

It was 11:15 PM.

“He’s trying to buy his way out,” Luca said, his voice cold. “Frank tipped off Falcone that the silver heist failed. Falcone knows how much my mother’s rosary means to me. He wants to steal it from the pawn shop before I can get it back, so he can hold it hostage to force the business takeover.”

Daniel drew his weapon, checking the magazine.

“We have forty-five minutes, Boss. I can have twenty men at Southside Brokers in twenty.”

“No,” Luca said immediately.

Daniel frowned. “Sir? If Falcone gets that rosary—”

“If twenty armed men roll up to a Syndicate pawn shop at midnight, it’s a bloodbath,” Luca interrupted. “The police will lock down the entire block. And Southside will destroy the rosary just to eliminate the evidence.”

Luca looked at the EPNS spoon on the table.

“We don’t use muscle for this. We use finesse.”

He turned to me.

“Emma.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You said your mother ran a pawn shop. Do you know how the back-room vaults operate?”

“Yes,” I nodded quickly. “I used to do the inventory ledgers. I know the lock systems. I know the holding periods.”

“Can you get us into the Southside holding vault quietly?”

My stomach dropped.

“Me?” I asked, my voice trembling slightly. “Sir, Southside is run by the Syndicate. If they catch us—”

“They won’t catch us,” Luca promised, his dark eyes locking onto mine. “Because I’ll be right beside you. I need your knowledge, Emma. I need you to find my mother’s rosary before Falcone’s men burn the place to the ground.”

I looked at Luca. This man had just secured my parents’ home. He had protected my family when he owed me nothing.

I didn’t hesitate.

“I’ll do it.”

The rain was pouring in sheets by the time Luca’s black SUV pulled up a block away from Southside Brokers.

The pawn shop was located in a gritty, industrial district. The neon ‘OPEN’ sign flickered violently in the storm. The metal security grates were pulled halfway down over the dirty windows.

It was 11:40 PM.

Luca and I sat in the front seats of the SUV. Daniel was in the back, checking a suppressed pistol.

“The front door is locked,” Daniel observed, looking through night-vision binoculars. “There are two guards in the front lobby. Heavy hitters. Syndicate muscle.”

“We don’t go through the front,” I said.

I pulled out a piece of paper where I had hastily drawn a layout of standard pawn shop architecture.

“High-end brokers don’t load million-dollar items through the front door,” I explained, pointing to my sketch. “There’s an armored loading dock in the alley behind the building. That’s where the armored cars do the cash pickups.”

“The alley is heavily guarded,” Daniel noted.

“Not tonight,” Luca said. “It’s raining. Syndicate thugs don’t like getting wet. They’ll be inside the loading bay, keeping the door cracked to smoke.”

Luca looked at me. He was wearing a dark leather jacket, his 9mm secured in a shoulder holster. He looked dangerous. He looked like the king of Chicago.

“Stay close to me, Emma,” Luca instructed softly. “If anything goes wrong, you run back to the car. Daniel will cover you. Understand?”

“Understood.”

We slipped out of the SUV and into the freezing rain.

We moved quickly through the shadows of the alley, the sound of the storm masking our footsteps.

As we approached the back of Southside Brokers, I saw the heavy steel loading door. Just as Luca predicted, it was propped open a few inches. The faint glow of a cigarette and the sound of muffled voices drifted out into the alley.

Luca held up a hand, signaling me to stop behind a dumpster.

He moved silently toward the cracked door.

He didn’t pull his gun. He waited for the exact moment one of the guards turned his back to flick his cigarette into the rain.

In a blur of motion, Luca grabbed the heavy steel door, ripped it open, and pulled the first guard out into the alley, slamming him against the brick wall. The guard was unconscious before he hit the wet pavement.

The second guard shouted and reached for his weapon, but Luca was already inside. A swift, brutal strike to the throat, and the second guard dropped to the concrete floor of the loading bay.

It took less than five seconds.

Luca turned and waved me inside.

I ran through the rain and slipped into the loading bay.

It smelled like stale smoke, wet cardboard, and gun oil.

“The vault,” Luca whispered. “Where is it?”

I pointed down a narrow, dimly lit hallway lined with security cameras.

“At the end of that hall,” I said. “But there’s a problem.”

“What?”

“The cameras.”

Luca looked at the glowing red lights on the lenses.

“They aren’t a problem,” he said.

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small, black electronic device. It looked like a modified cell phone.

“Marco wasn’t the only one who understood security,” Luca muttered. He pressed a button on the device.

The red lights on the cameras flickered, then went dark.

“Looping the feed,” Luca said. “We have five minutes before the system registers the anomaly and alerts the front desk.”

We sprinted down the hallway.

We reached the heavy, stainless steel vault door. It was massive. The kind of vault you see in federal banks.

In the center of the door was a digital keypad and a biometric thumb scanner.

“Can you open it?” Luca asked.

I stared at the thumb scanner.

“No,” I admitted, my heart sinking. “It’s biometric. Only the manager can open it.”

We were out of time. Falcone’s men were arriving in ten minutes.

Luca stared at the vault door.

Then he looked down at the unconscious guard he had dragged into the hallway.

The guard wasn’t the manager. His thumb wouldn’t work.

But hanging from the guard’s heavy leather belt was a massive ring of keys.

And tucked between the keys was a small, plastic, blue keycard.

I recognized it immediately.

“Sir!” I pointed at the belt. “The blue card!”

Luca grabbed it.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s a manual override card,” I said, my voice rising in excitement. “Pawn shops have to keep them on hand for state inspectors, in case the digital system fails during an audit. Slide it into the slot below the keypad!”

Luca jammed the card into the slot.

The light on the keypad turned green.

The heavy steel bolts inside the door clanked loudly, retracting into the frame.

Luca grabbed the massive handle and pulled.