Chapter 13 - The Reckoning at Midnight
Vance was fast. But Marco had lived in this house for fifteen years, and his loyalty wasn't bought with stipends—it was forged in blood.
Instead of drawing his weapon, Marco lunged with his entire body, throwing his heavy shoulder into the side of the table and flipping the massive, two-hundred-pound slab of cured Italian oak upward like a shield.
Brrrrrt.
A burst of 7.62 rounds tore through the thick timber, sending large jagged splinters flying across the room and gouging deep chunks of stone out of the ceiling.
I rolled to the right behind the cellar’s stone masonry pillar, drawing Julian’s black automatic from my shoulder holster.
Marco groaned as a stray round clipped his bicep through the oak slab, but he didn't falter. He dropped to one knee, pulled his backup combat blade from his belt, and threw it with terrifying, underhanded force around the edge of the wood.
The blade sliced through Vance’s left forearm, severing the tendon of his support hand.
Vance cried out, his carbine’s muzzle pitching downward as his grip failed.
I stepped out from behind the pillar and fired three rapid rounds.
The first struck Vance’s center chest plate, absorbing the energy but knocking him backward off his feet. The second round shattered his right shoulder. The third punched clean through his weapon's aluminum receiver, rendering the carbine useless in an explosion of springs and sheared metal.
Vance slammed hard against the damp limestone wall of the tasting room, gasping for breath, his right arm dangling uselessly at his side.
He didn't attempt to draw his secondary weapon. He slid down the stone until he sat on the flagstones, his back pressed against the foundation of the house he had betrayed, coughing up shallow, ragged breaths.
I walked toward him, my automatic lowered, my eyes fixed on his ruined face.
“The helicopter that fled,” I said, every syllable dropping like a lead weight. “Where was it going?”
Vance wheezed, blood trickling from his nostrils. “It doesn't matter, Adrien. The consortium... they already have the satellite link. They have Julian’s DNA verification. All they needed was a single drop of your children’s blood to unlock the secondary authorization on the cold wallets.”
“Dr. Gable’s cooler,” I recalled. “The medical vials.”
“Gable didn't put the vials in the cooler in the garage,” Vance spat, his eyes gleaming with malicious satisfaction. “He passed them to me on the service stairs while you were running through the storm. I uploaded the spectral genetic analysis to the Macau receiver from the rooftop antenna five minutes before you breached the nursery.”
My heart hammered against my ribs, cold and furious.
“Then the transfer is already underway?”
“You have thirty minutes,” Vance whispered with a bloody smirk. “The handshake takes forty-five minutes to clear the international banking nodes. When the clock hits four in the morning, the Moretti accounts vanish into three thousand phantom LLCs across three continents. You’ll be penniless, Adrien. Stripped of every asset. Every safehouse. Every legal shield. Your enemies will smell the blood within hours. You won't live to see your triplets turn one year old.”
Marco pressed a heavy cloth against his bleeding arm, stepping up beside me. “Adrien... we can't stop an encrypted international transaction without the master encryption kill-switch. And that key was buried with your father.”
I looked down at the bleeding traitor on the floor.
Then I looked across the room, toward the open, destroyed passage behind my father’s painting where the hidden operations hub sat in the dark.
“No,” I said softly. “It wasn't buried with my father.”
I remembered Sophie standing on the hearth rug in her crumpled yellow dress, her small hands pressed flat against the wall, listening to the hum of the pipes.
“The man with the mean eyes. He isn't sleeping.”
May you like
I didn't execute Vance. I kicked his broken weapon across the room, turned on my heel, and sprinted back up the stone stairs toward the study, leaving Marco to bind the traitor’s wounds for federal interrogation.
I wasn't done with my father’s ghost.
