UNDER THE DON’S PROTECTION のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 51 - チャプター 60

Luca’s POVThe mechanical arm whirred downward like a guillotine, needle gleaming under the tunnel’s emergency blue glow. Forty minutes until the hub’s self-destruct. Thirty-seven until Mikhail’s Phase Two nanos turned Berlin into a graveyard of selective organ failure. My marrow the final key Enzo had hidden inside me was the prize they all wanted now.Dante, blood soaking his shirt from the earlier stab, lunged. He caught the arm mid-descent, muscles straining, metal groaning as he forced it sideways. The needle scraped concrete inches from my ribs. Sparks flew.Rocco fired twice bullets ricocheting off the arm’s reinforced casing. One round punched through a joint; hydraulic fluid sprayed like black blood. The mechanism stuttered but kept coming.“Get him out!” Dante roared, voice cracking from pain and fury.Rocco hauled me backward, boots skidding on slick floor. “Move, Luca!”I couldn’t. The euphoria hit harder nanos flooding my system, turning terror into a strange, floating ca

Luca’s POVDarkness wasn’t empty it was a void filled with echoes. My heartbeat stopped by Sofia’s neural blocker left me floating in a limbo where time stretched like taffy. No pain. No fear. Just fragments of lives unlived, swirling like the nanos we’d unleashed. But the purge code had fired: global swarm self-terminating, the hub’s core overloading into a contained implosion. Mikhail’s plane—mid-descent would hit a dead network, his empire crumbling mid-air.I wasn’t dead. The blocker was temporary—a chemical flatline, reversible with adrenaline Sofia had promised would kick in after sixty seconds. But in that suspended minute, memories flooded—not mine. Sofia’s. As if the hub’s dying AI had patched her consciousness into mine, one last Volkov trick.Flashback: Sofia at sixteen, in a sterile Moscow clinic Alexei called “home.” Our mother—fragile, broken—whispered secrets before the overdose that wasn’t accidental. “He’s not your father, Sofia. Alexei bred us like lab rats. Purity a

Luca’s POVThe warehouse extraction point dissolved into chaos the moment Mikhail’s chopper touched down on the bridge above. Katarina’s team laid down covering fire—automatic bursts chewing concrete—but the Spetsnaz were relentless, advancing under smoke grenades and flashbangs. We barely made it to the secondary boat Katarina had stashed at the river’s edge: a sleek black RIB with twin outboards.Rocco hauled Dante aboard first, then me. Katarina jumped in last, shoving the throttle forward. The boat surged into the current, bullets stitching the water behind us. The chopper pursued for half a kilometer before banking hard either low fuel or orders to regroup. Mikhail wasn’t done; he was calculating.We ran dark down the Spree, cutting lights, hugging the bank until the city lights faded. Katarina’s voice cut through the engine roar: “Private airstrip thirty minutes out. My contact has a Gulfstream fueled and waiting. We’re wheels-up for Port Harcourt before Mikhail can scramble int

Luca’s POVThe flames from the burning terminal licked the night sky behind us, casting flickering orange across the Bonny River as Eze’s boat cut through the delta’s murky channels. Salt air stung my eyes, mixing with tears I hadn’t shed yet. Mikhail’s body throat slit by Rocco’s blade sank into the abyss we’d left behind. The swarm 2.0 was gone, nodes fried, legacy purged in fire. But as the adrenaline ebbed, a hollow ache settled in my chest. Who was I now? Luca Marino, the accountant who’d laundered for monsters without knowing? Or Luca Volkov, the heir who’d danced with plagues and bloodlines? The curse had defined me trapped me in auctions, viruses, betrayals. Without it, I felt unmoored, a ghost in my own skin.Dante slumped against me on the boat’s bench, his head on my shoulder, breath steady but weak. The counter-agent had stabilized him, but his wound needed real stitches. Rocco steered one handed, his other gripping my thigh possessive, reassuring. Katarina sat at the bow,

Luca’s POVThe Land Rover tore through the bush, branches whipping the windshield, dust choking the air behind us. Eze’s warning had come too late Mikhail’s loyalists had anticipated the node’s destruction, scattering secondary teams across the delta highways. Gunfire cracked from the treeline; a tire blew, the Rover fishtailing. Katarina wrestled the wheel, veering onto a dirt track that narrowed into mangrove swamp. We lost them in the maze of roots and water engines fading, replaced by the slap of waves and distant thunder.We abandoned the vehicle at a fishing village, paid a boatman in cash to take us south to Bonny, then a speedboat to Lagos. Twenty hours of salt spray, diesel fumes, and silence. Dante slept fitfully against my shoulder; Rocco never closed his eyes, hand always on his weapon. Katarina coordinated via encrypted sat-phone new IDs, clean passports, a private jet waiting at Lagos executive terminal.By the time we reached the safehouse in Ikoyi a gated villa overloo