90 "**“STOP WAVING YOUR HANDS! YOU'RE EMBARRASSING ME!”

The dawn arrived without warmth. Chicago was blanketed in a suffocating gray fog that rolled off Lake Michigan, swallowing the city in a ghostlike haze.

Luca did not wait for the threat to come to his doorstep.

Within thirty minutes of Marco’s report, the estate transformed into a military operation. Three armored tactical vans were brought into the subterranean garage beneath the mansion.

"We are moving," Luca announced, strapping a black tactical holster over his fresh bandages. His face was carved from granite. "The Lake Geneva compound in Wisconsin. It’s off the grid, reinforced with seismic sensors, bullet-resistant glass, and completely isolated behind forty acres of private timberland. We hold up there until Vance and Vanessa are found and neutralized."

"What about Leo and my mother?" I asked, clutching Isabella’s small hand tightly in mine.

Isabella was dressed in warm wool leggings and a heavy down coat. She held her velvet bear under one arm and kept looking up at me, sensing the emergency. Her hands were tucked inside her mittens, but her eyes were wide, taking in the assault rifles being loaded into cases.

"Marco has already evacuated them," Luca assured me, kneeling down beside Isabella to zip her coat all the way to her chin. "They are being transported in a separate decoy convoy to a private airstrip, then flown directly to the Wisconsin compound. You will see Leo before dinner tonight, Peanut."

Isabella watched his lips move, then looked at his hands as he signed: *Safe house. Big trees. Snow.*

She nodded, signing back: *Will there be hot cocoa?*

A rare, heartbreakingly soft smile touched Luca’s lips. *All the cocoa you can drink, my brave girl.*

He stood up, looking at me. "Claire, you ride with Isabella in the primary armored transport. Marco is driving. I will take the chase vehicle behind you with four men. If anything happens on the highway—anything at all—Marco does not stop. He drives through whatever blocks the road. Do you understand?"

"You're using yourself as bait," I realized, terror constricting my lungs. "The chase car will draw their fire."

"My life is collateral, Claire," Luca said, his voice flat and resolute. "My daughter’s life is not. Neither is yours."

Before I could protest, he turned to Marco. "Roll out."

The journey began in tense, suffocating silence.

The reinforced windows of the armored Suburban were tinted nearly black. Isabella sat between me and a mountain of emergency medical gear, her small head resting against my ribs. I had taken off her mittens so we could sign beneath a wool blanket, playing a silent spelling game to keep her mind off the heavily armed men in the front seats.

*S-U-N-S-H-I-N-E,* Isabella spelled out, her little fingers moving rhythmically against my palm.

*Good,* I signed back, kissing the crown of her head. *Now spell: B-R-A-V-E.*

She smiled faintly and began forming the letters.

Up front, Marco watched the tactical mirrors, his hand resting on the grip of a modified submachine gun resting on the center console. Through the encrypted radio, Luca’s voice crackled intermittently from the chase vehicle fifty yards behind us: *Route clean. Mile marker forty-two clear. Keep speed at seventy.*

For forty-five minutes, the convoy sliced through the dense fog along Interstate 94, heading north toward the Wisconsin border. The towering skyline of Chicago melted away into endless stretches of barren winter trees and snow-dusted farmland.

I began to breathe a little easier. Perhaps Vanessa hadn't tracked the convoy. Perhaps Luca’s counter-intelligence had thrown them off.

Then, the world shattered.

A deafening explosion ripped through the morning air.

The Suburban violently shuddered as a shockwave hit our rear quarter-panel. Through the back tinted glass, I saw a fireball erupt on the highway shoulder.

"IED!" Marco roared, slamming his foot on the accelerator. The massive engine screamed as the heavy vehicle surged forward. "They mined the drainage culvert!"

Through the rear window, my heart stopped.

Luca’s chase vehicle had taken the brunt of the blast. The front bumper was shredded, smoke pouring from the hood, but the armored frame held. It spun across two lanes of traffic, rubber burning against asphalt, before stabilizing.

From the fog on the right side of the interstate, two unmarked black heavy-duty pickup trucks roared out from an abandoned weigh station, flanking the highway like hunting wolves.

"Luca!" I screamed, instinctively throwing my entire body over Isabella, shielding her small frame beneath mine on the leather seat.

Isabella couldn't hear the explosion, but she felt the violent lurch of the vehicle and saw the terror on my face. She buried her face into my chest, her arms wrapping around my waist with desperate, frantic strength.

Over the radio, Luca’s voice barked through static, cold as liquid nitrogen: *Marco! Punch through! Do not stop! Vance is in the lead truck! I have the secondary! GO!*

Automatic gunfire erupted.

The sound of high-caliber bullets slamming into the reinforced steel frame of our Suburban sounded like hail hitting a tin roof—loud, violent, and relentless. The bullet-resistant glass in the rear spider-webbed into white, opaque fractures, but held.

"Hold on back there!" Marco shouted, violently swerving the heavy vehicle to ram one of the pickup trucks trying to box us in against the concrete highway divider.

Metal shrieked against metal. Sparks sprayed across the driver-side window as Marco used the six-ton armored Suburban as a battering ram, shoving the pickup truck into the median until its front axle snapped, sending it rolling violently across the frozen grass.

*One down,* I thought hysterically.

Through the fractured rear glass, I saw Luca’s damaged vehicle retaliating with lethal fury. Luca himself was leaning out of the passenger window, an automatic rifle braced against his shoulder. He fired three controlled bursts straight through the windshield of the second pursuing truck.

The truck violently veered off the road, crashing into a concrete bridge abutment in an explosion of steam and shattered glass.

"We clear?" Marco panted, checking his mirrors, sweat pouring down his scarred face.

"No," a voice crackled over the radio—not Luca’s.

A woman's voice. High, shrill, and dripping with manic poison.

Vanessa had tapped into the encrypted frequency.

"Did you really think it would be that easy, Luca?" she laughed, the sound distorted by static. "You took my father! You took my wedding! You took my entire life!"

"Marco!" Luca’s voice cut in, frantic and raw. "Vance isn't on the highway! He bypassed the intercept! He’s ahead of you at the border toll!"

Before Marco could react, a massive commercial tow truck pulled directly across all three lanes of the upcoming toll plaza two hundred yards ahead, completely blocking the roadway.

Standing atop the flatbed of the tow truck was a tall, skeletal man in a heavy black coat, holding a military-grade grenade launcher.

Victor Vance.