Kidnapping the Assassin: The Mafia Don’s Fatal Mistake

The Avalanche Protocol

Chapter 28

[Elara]

The Swiss Alps do not forgive mistakes.

The air inside the unpressurized cabin of the cargo plane was freezing. I sat strapped to the metal bulkhead, my breath pluming in white clouds before my face. Beside me, Cassian was entirely still, his eyes closed, mentally preparing for the violence ahead. The cabin was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with Italian Syndicate soldiers, their faces painted in the grim, pale light of the jump-lamps.

"Three minutes to drop zone!" the pilot's voice crackled through the intercom.

The red light above the rear ramp began to flash aggressively.

I unbuckled my harness and stood up. The heavy sniper rifle banged against my spine, sending a sharp throb of pain through my healing lacerations. I ignored it. I walked to the center of the cabin, looking at the army Cassian had somehow miraculously united.

"Listen up!" I shouted over the roar of the engines.

Every face turned toward me. They were looking at the Viper.

"The Citadel is built directly into the face of Mount Rosa," I yelled, pulling up a holographic schematic from my wrist-pad. "It's a fortress designed to withstand a nuclear blast. Heavy steel blast doors, automated turret defenses, and a localized radar jammer. We cannot land the planes."

Murmurs of unease rippled through the soldiers.

"So we don't land," I continued, my voice entirely devoid of fear. "We jump. We drop directly onto the upper ridges above their radar net. We are going to trigger an avalanche."

Don Salvatore’s lead enforcer, a giant of a man named Rocco, frowned. "An avalanche? Donna Rossi, that will bury the fortress."

"That's the point," I replied coldly. "The Citadel is built into the rock, but its exhaust vents and communication arrays are exposed. We bury the fortress in two hundred tons of snow. We choke their generators, kill their comms, and force them to manually open the emergency blast doors to breathe. When they open those doors... we breach."

The red light above the ramp suddenly turned green.

The massive rear door groaned open, revealing the blinding white expanse of the Alps passing dizzily beneath us. The wind howled into the cabin, instantly dropping the temperature to sub-zero.

Cassian stood up, moving to stand right beside me. He didn't have a parachute. Neither did I.

We were jumping in specialized, high-altitude wingsuits.

"Ready to fly, wife?" Cassian asked, his dark eyes entirely alive with the thrill of the hunt.

"Follow my vector," I commanded, pulling my goggles down over my eyes.

I didn't wait for a countdown. I sprinted toward the open ramp and threw myself headfirst into the freezing, empty sky.

The wind hit me like a physical wall, tearing the breath from my lungs. I extended my arms and legs, the fabric of the wingsuit catching the violent updrafts. I stabilized, banking sharply to the right.

I looked back.

Cassian was right behind me, a massive black shadow cutting through the white clouds. Behind him, hundreds of soldiers followed, the sky suddenly filled with the dark shapes of the Rossi syndicate descending upon the mountain like a flock of predatory birds.

Beneath us, the Citadel came into view.

It was a monstrosity of modern engineering. A massive, brutalist steel structure jutting out of the sheer rock face, completely isolated from civilization.

"Target the upper ridge!" I yelled into my comms, banking hard toward the massive, snow-heavy peak directly above the fortress.

I pulled my deployment chute, the violent jerk yanking painfully at my injured back. I hit the deep powder of the ridge, rolling to distribute the impact.

Cassian landed twenty feet away, smoothly discarding his chute.

The soldiers landed in waves around us, immediately setting up defensive perimeters in the deep snow.

"Plant the charges!" Cassian roared, gesturing to the massive snowpack above the Citadel's roof.

Matteo and a team of demolitions experts rushed forward, burying heavy blocks of C4 deep into the fault lines of the snow shelf.

"Charges set!" Matteo yelled, scrambling back to our position.

I looked down at the steel fortress. Inside those walls sat the men who had orchestrated every ounce of suffering I had endured for the last five years. They had tortured my handler. They had thrown my sister off a roof.

I pulled the remote detonator from my belt.

"For Lily," I whispered.

I pressed the button.

The side of the mountain detonated.

A deafening, catastrophic boom echoed across the Alps. The ground beneath our feet violently shuddered. For a second, time seemed to stand still.

Then, the ridge broke.

Two hundred thousand tons of compacted snow, ice, and rock sheared away from the mountain face. It began as a slow rumble, quickly escalating into a terrifying, apocalyptic roar as the avalanche cascaded downward, burying the entire steel roof of the Citadel under fifty feet of crushing white ruin.

A massive plume of snow blinded us.

When the dust finally settled, the fortress was completely invisible, entombed in the mountain.

Cassian racked the slide of his sidearm. He looked at me, a feral, terrifying grin on his face.

"Let's go knock on the door."