Chapter 57 - The Dossier from Ohio
The detonation was an apocalyptic flash of white and thunder. The concussion blew out the remaining glass fixtures in the ceiling, showering us in razor-sharp crystal shards. The air instantly filled with the acrid, metallic stench of magnesium and burning wool.
My ears rang with a deafening, hollow whine. Through the smoke, shadows moved fast.
*BAM! BAM! BAM!*
I leaned around the corner of the granite island and fired three blind rounds into the doorway. A guttural grunt followed; one of the tactical operators stumbled back, his body armor taking the brunt of the kinetic shock. It bought us three seconds.
"The utility corridor!" I coughed through the white smoke, hauling Khloe to her feet. She was trembling so violently she could barely find traction on the slick floor, but her maternal instinct was supreme—she kept Grace tucked under her jacket, shielding the infant's ears against the ringing blast.
We bolted down the back hallway, away from the terrace and toward the service entrance.
Behind us, Isabella’s voice rose in a frantic, hysterical shriek from the wine cellar stairs: "Over here! Don't shoot! I have the security codes! It's Isabella! Don't shoot me, you idiots!"
"She's selling us out," Khloe breathed, the tears carving clean lines through the soot on her cheeks. "She’s selling her own blood to buy another minute of life."
"She won't survive them," I muttered, kicking open the reinforced metal door of the utility garage. Inside sat a matte-black Audi RS6 Avant—the extraction vehicle our underground transport broker had parked here twelve hours ago.
I hit the wall button to raise the motorized garage gate. The chain rattled slowly. Too slowly.
Khloe backed against the hood of the car, clutching the baby, her breathing shallow and ragged. She looked at the blood on my knuckles, then up into my eyes.
"Tell me," she demanded. The absolute finality in her voice froze the air between us. Even with automatic gunfire echoing down the corridor we had just fled, she refused to take another step until she had the truth. "Did Anthony Vance pay you to track me down?"
I swallowed the bile rising in my throat. The shame tasted like rusted copper.
"Yes," I confessed, my voice raw. "Five years ago. I had just left the federal task force. My private intelligence firm was drowning in debt. Anthony Vance hired me under a corporate shell company. He told me you were his runaway mistress who stole proprietary financial records."
Khloe let out a shattered, breathless gasp. "You tracked me to that diner in Cincinnati."
"I tracked you for three weeks," I said, stepping closer to her, though every instinct told me she wanted to put a bullet through my chest. "I watched you work twelve-hour shifts. I saw the bruises on your arms that Anthony had left on you. I read the medical reports of the first time they took you to that clinic. I realized within forty-eight hours that you weren't a corporate thief—you were a hostage escaping an empire of monsters."
Footsteps pounded outside the garage door. The iron handle rattled violently.
"And what did you do, Marcus?!" she wept. "Did you turn me over?!"
"I burned the file," I said, staring directly into her soul. "I falsified a death certificate in Kentucky. I told Anthony Vance your car went off a bridge into the Ohio River. I walked away from the retainer, I wiped your trail completely clean, and six months later... when I couldn't stop thinking about the girl who chose poverty over hell... I came back to that diner as a customer."
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Khloe stared at me, her chest heaving, the agony in her eyes warring with an impossible disbelief.
The garage door behind us blew off its hinges with a deafening crack.
