Blood On White Linen
The rooftop was hell.
Glass sparkled through the air like dying stars, raining down with every thunderous gunshot that shattered the peace seconds ago. One bullet had killed the waitress. One had nearly killed Adriano.
Now… silence.
The kind that rings in your ears.
Adriano pressed himself flat behind an overturned table, chest heaving. Splinters dug into his forearm. His wine glass lay shattered inches from his hand, red seeping into the white tablecloth like blood.
Another shot cracked through the night. It punched into the wall near Alessandro’s head, sending chips of concrete into his cheek.
“Fuck!” he hissed, ducking lower.
No one fired back. They couldn’t.
“We need to move,” Gabriele growled from behind his cover, a flipped wooden bar cart now riddled with bullet holes.
Adriano peeked around the side—BANG!—a bullet instantly whistled past, taking out a decorative light behind him.
“No visual,” he cursed, ducking back.
They were pinned.
The sniper was patient. Precise. One of the best.
Whoever sent him didn’t want survivors.
Alessandro wiped blood from a fresh graze on his cheek and pulled his watch off, flipping the face up to use the glass like a mirror. He angled it slowly… carefully...
A flicker. There.
Just for a second—a faint glint. Like light catching on glass. Then, a flash of red. The laser from the sniper.
He narrowed his eyes.
“Top floor. Across the street. Second window from the left,” he said coldly. “That’s where the bastard is.”
Adriano followed the direction with a glance. “You sure?”
“Positive.”
Another round slammed into a wine bottle behind them. The spray of glass and liquid hissed like rain.
Adriano pulled out his phone, staying low. He hit a contact: Serena ‘Shadow’ DeLuca.
It rang once.
She answered on the second.
“Boss?”
“We’re under attack. I'm at a rooftop restaurant in Manhattan called Echelon—there's a fucking sniper across the street. Top floor, second window from the left. Get me eyes.”
“I’m on it.”
She didn’t ask questions. Didn’t panic. Just got to work.
—
Serena sat in her darkened safehouse, six monitors glowing before her. She snapped on her headset, fingers flying across keys. Within seconds, she hacked into the security grid for the buildings surrounding the restaurant.
“There,” she whispered, pulling up the feed for the sniper’s building.
A thermal outline moved behind the glass. The sniper was crouched, still firing—methodical, unhurried.
Serena quickly picked up her phone and called Marco and Luca. “You guys, there's a rooftop hit on the brothers. Sniper’s across the street. They're at a rooftop restaurant in Manhattan called Echelon. Get there NOW.”
“It’s about time something interesting happened around here,” came Marco’s voice—low, grim, already on the move.
“On it,” Luca muttered. “I’ll circle to the rooftop, stay behind cover.”
Serena brought up the sniper’s gear layout on her screen. Digital scope. Night-vision enhanced.
Smirking, she hacked into the building’s grid and killed the power.
Inside the sniper’s nest, his scope flickered out. The screen went black.
He cursed. Began adjusting—fumbling.
That was all the window they needed.
—
Marco Varela was already scaling the side of the opposite building, gloves gripping rough stone and pipe like a goddamn panther.
He climbed fast. Quiet. A knife in one hand, pistol in the other.
When the lights in the sniper’s building died, Marco smiled.
“Serena’s a fucking miracle.” he muttered to himself.
He reached the top, crawled into a broken window, and moved like a ghost—low, lethal, all muscle and control.
The sniper was too distracted to hear him.
One step closer. Another. Marco’s shadow grew behind the man as he worked on his backup scope.
Marco stepped up behind him, pressed the pistol to the back of his skull, and pulled the trigger.
BANG!
The sniper slumped forward against the window, a spray of blood painting the glass from inside.
Marco exhaled once. “Sniper down.”
—
Back on the rooftop, Alessandro peeked over the table and saw the sniper's laser gone. The shots had stopped.
Gabriele sat up, his hair soaked in sweat. “Is it over?”
Adriano stood carefully, his gun drawn. “It’s never over.”
That’s when the stairwell door exploded open.
Men in tactical gear stormed out, firing.
Gabriele dove back behind cover. “That shot wasn’t to kill us. It was to trap us!”
Close-range gunfire filled the rooftop as chaos returned.
The brothers fired back, ducking, moving tactically.
Alessandro shot a man in the throat, grabbed his weapon, and pivoted.
Adriano leapt over a toppled table and tackled another attacker. They rolled, fists flying, until Adriano got the upper hand and cracked the man’s skull open on the edge of the bar.
Gabriele kicked a chair into one man’s legs and shot him point-blank as he fell.
From the entrance to the back stairwell, Luca appeared.
“Roof’s sealed. I’m in.”
He slid a pistol across the floor. Alessandro snatched it up and nodded once in thanks.
Then Serena’s voice crackled in Adriano’s earpiece.
“Locking the restaurant now.”
A moment later—all doors slammed shut.
Adriano grinned as the tables turned.
“They’re trapped in here with us now.”
The fight turned brutal—hands, knives, bottles. Blood sprayed the white tablecloths. Gunfire deafened the night.
Marco arrived seconds later, swinging through the rooftop window like a demon, slamming an attacker into the wine rack and choking him out with a broken corkscrew.
It was coordinated, deadly, intimate.
The Greco brothers, fighting side-by-side like wolves.
But amidst the chaos—something changed.
Across the room, Alessandro turned to shoot a man diving for cover—
He didn’t see the one behind him.
A gun raised. Finger squeezing the trigger.
“SANDRO!” Adriano’s voice cracked through the gunfire.
Alessandro turned too slow.
Adriano lunged.
He tackled his brother, shoving him out of the line of fire.
BANG!
The bullet ripped through Adriano instead.
His body collapsed across Alessandro’s, breath catching, blood gushing out fast.
Time slowed.
Gabriele shouted something—but it was drowned in the sound of the gunfire.
Marco turned, eyes wide.
Alessandro caught his brother in his arms as they fell behind cover again.