Chapter 20 - THE TRAP AT THE RIVER'S EDGE
The heavy steel blast doors behind Daniel slammed shut with the force of a guillotine.
Red emergency lights bathed the vault in a blood-colored glow. The high-pitched wail of silent alarms echoed through the reinforced concrete walls. From the ceiling vents, a dense, odorless white gas began to hiss into the room.
"Enjoy the sleep, Daniel," Sterling said, slipping on an oxygen mask hidden beneath his blotter and stepping into a reinforced panic-tube behind his desk. "Your truck has already been tracked to your uncle's safehouse. By midnight, Lily will be aboard a private jet bound for Zurich. And you will be found here—a disgraced father who broke into a judge's home in a fit of violent psychosis."
"Sterling!" Daniel roared.
He fired three rounds at the panic-tube glass, but the bulletproof polymer only spiderwebbed. The white gas burned Daniel’s throat, attacking his central nervous system, making his limbs feel like lead. His vision began to tunnel. His knees buckled, hitting the cold marble floor.
*Home is where you don’t have to be afraid.*
Lily’s voice echoed in his dying consciousness. The drawing of the yellow room flashed behind his eyes.
With the last ounce of his fading strength, Daniel didn't reach for his gun. He reached into his tactical pocket, pulled out the high-yield breaching charge he had taken from the motel assassin, slapped it directly against the vault’s primary power junction box, and slammed the detonator button down.
*BOOM!*
The entire estate shuddered. The power grid blew out in a violent cascade of sparks. The blast doors unlocked in emergency fail-safe mode, swinging open. Daniel hauled his poisoned body through the smoke, stumbling into the night air as sirens wailed in the distance.
Bleeding, coughing up blood, his vision blurred with toxic haze, Daniel staggered to his hidden motorcycle parked in the woods. His burner phone vibrated in his jacket.
He answered with a bloody thumb.
"Daniel?" Marcus’s voice was hysterical, screaming over the sound of automatic gunfire and shattering wood. "They found us! The safehouse is compromised! They took her—Daniel, they took Lily!"
A cold, unfamiliar voice cut onto the frequency, chilling Daniel to his very marrow:
*"If you want to see her alive, Vance, come to the old dock at Blackwood Lake. You have thirty minutes. Come alone. Or the next time you see your daughter, she’ll be at the bottom of the water."*
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The line went dead.
Daniel revved the engine, the headlights slicing through the black forest, racing against the clock toward the lake where the nightmare had first begun—unaware that waiting for him on the dock wasn't just Sterling's men, but the one person he thought was locked away forever behind bars.
