All Chapters of The Glass Rose : Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

Lucien's POV The yellow light of dawn had barely touched the tops of the orange groves when the first heavy round punched a clean hole through our reinforced iron door, and the sound of fifty automatic rifles opening fire at the same time from the irrigation ditch turned the quiet morning into a solid wall of noise that rattled the tin roof over our heads. I threw myself behind a stack of thick timber beams that Paolo had jammed against the front window frame, and the plaster dust was flying so thick that I couldn't even see the edge of the driveway where Rossi’s lead vanguard vehicles were parked across our main exit line."Paolo, don't waste your cartridges on the armored cabins because you need to aim low and hit the shooters who are trying to crawl through the drainage pipes on the left side of the lane!" I screamed over the roar of the gunfire while I cycled the action of my shotgun and sent two heavy slugs into the weeds where a muzzle flash was blinking."They brought two seco

Matteo's POV ​The cold water of the creek was splashing straight into my boots as our trucks hit the muddy bank, but my eyes weren't on the road ahead because the morning light had finally cleared the fog on the upper ridge and showed a silver armored SUV parked right next to the old stone watchtower. Don Salvatore himself was standing right beside the open door with a radio in his hand while he pointed his cane down at our stalled caravan, and the sight of that man directing the shooters who had destroyed our whole neighborhood made the blood rush into my ears so loud that I didn't even hear Alessia screaming at me to keep my head inside the truck cabin. "Matteo, get back into the rear seat right now because the southern shooters are already setting up their rifle lines on the lower terrace and you can't run up that rocky slope with your leg in that condition!" Lucien yelled as he reached over from the driver's side to grab the strap of my vest, but I had already clicked the door

Lucien's POV The wipers on the secondary pickup truck were struggling to clear the heavy Roman rain as we finally slipped through the southern highway gates just past three o'clock in the morning, and the streets of the capital were completely empty except for the occasional delivery van because the local police patrols were still concentrated around the smoking ruins of the old theater district. We had spent the last five hours driving through the dark regional back roads to avoid the state trooper checkpoints, and Paolo had guided our two remaining vehicles straight to an upscale residential complex near the Parioli district where we had recently used a portion of the stolen southern payroll cash to secure a hidden luxury penthouse under a fake corporate name."Keep the headlights low as you enter the underground garage, Paolo, because the building porter stays in the front office until dawn and we can't have him looking at the fresh mud and the bullet scratches on these side pane

Alessia's POV The tires of our black sedan rolled smoothly over the wet gravel driveway of the Palazzo Riveria, and the bright crystal chandeliers inside the high palace windows were throwing long lines of yellow light across the dark waters of the Tiber River below while hundreds of Rome's wealthiest investors climbed the wide marble steps. Lucien bypassed the main valet line to keep our vehicle positioned near the side exit lane, and he stepped out of the driver's seat to open my door with a calm, formal precision that completely hid the fact that he was carrying a compact automatic frame under the silk lining of his tailored tuxedo."The silver cigarette case is humming right inside my evening purse so the local signal jammer is already scrambling the immediate biometric frequencies, but you need to keep your pace steady as we cross the main metal threshold because the security guards are checking the manual guest log," I whispered to him as I adjusted the long folds of my midnigh

Matteo's POV The interior of the surveillance van smelled like hot coffee and stale circuit boards, and I was hunched over the main terminal with my fingers flying across the keys while the audio feed from Alessia’s hidden microphone crackled with the sounds of shuffling cards and the low, tense murmur of the high-stakes game. I had the palace’s secondary server node looped into my own local drive, and the green progress bars were dancing across my monitors because the encryption keys Count Alberto was using for his private ledger were surprisingly complex, but they were no match for the cracking software I had been building since the factory fire."Keep him talking for another two minutes because the handshake protocol between his baccarat terminal and his secure offshore cloud is currently syncing, and if he folds now he might disconnect before the full key path is dumped into our system," I whispered into the secure channel, and I could hear the faint sound of Alessia’s laugh echo