A Feared Mafia Boss Walked Into a Luxury Restaurant With His 10-Month-Old Baby—But the Boy SCREAMED Every Time His Father Pulled Him Away From a Poor Waitress! Then the Baby Touched Her Face and Fell SILENT… and the Mafia Boss’s Next Question Changed EVERYTHING! / Chapter 49 / 50

Chapter 49 - The Crumbling Spire

"Dante! The ceiling!" Claire screamed.

Massive slabs of volcanic basalt were detaching from the cavernous roof, crashing down onto the catwalks in showers of dust and pulverized stone. The glass floor beneath their feet groaned, webbed with thousands of fractures as seawater began shooting upward under colossal hydraulic pressure.

Dante lunged forward, wrapping his right arm around Claire and pulling her and Leo against his chest as a two-ton boulder smashed into the platform where they had stood a second earlier. The concussion threw them against the maintenance wall, Dante taking the full brunt of the impact against his spine, grinding his teeth to suppress a scream of agony.

"Can you run?" Claire yelled through the choking dust, checking Leo frantically. The baby was coughing, his small hands clutching tightly to Claire’s vest, the blue geometric light on his wrist pulsing faster, synchronizing with the violent thrumming in the water below.

"I can run," Dante growled, pushing himself off the wall, his vision swimming with red pain. "The emergency egress shaft leads to the upper helipad on the cliffside! Move!"

They sprinted through the collapsing corridors as the mountain died around them. Bulkheads crumpled like paper cups beneath the force of the incoming ocean. Behind them, the lower levels were completely swallowed by black, churning water, the screams of automated alarms drowned out by the roar of the Atlantic bursting into the subterranean hollows.

They reached the spiral emergency stairwell, Dante taking the stairs two at a time, Claire right behind him. Every muscle in their bodies burned, their lungs filled with concrete dust and sulfur. Above them, a circle of storm-gray daylight marked the exit to the upper observation platform.

Dante kicked the emergency exit door with everything he had left.

The door flew off its hinges, and the violent fury of the Atlantic gale hit them like a wall. They stumbled onto the windswept basalt landing pad perched five hundred feet above the raging ocean. The storm was at its peak; horizontal rain slashed across their faces, lightning tearing through the midnight-black clouds.

Hovering fifty feet above the pad, its twin rotors fighting the 60-knot winds, was Dante’s heavy armored extraction helicopter, its winch cable already dropping toward the deck.

"Clip Leo in first!" Dante shouted over the deafening scream of the turbine engines, grabbing the heavy steel carabiner from the descending harness.

Claire unbuckled the child from her tactical vest and secured him into the reinforced, watertight evacuation pod attached to the winch. As she sealed the hatch, she pressed her palm against the glass, whispering, "I love you, Leo. We're right behind you."

The winch operator hit the ascent button, and the pod began rising into the air toward the open cargo door of the helicopter.

Dante reached for the second harness to secure Claire.