Three-year-old Owen was shoved into the deep koi pond even though Celeste knew he could not swim.

The blast tore the heavy blast door off its reinforced hinges with an earth-shattering roar.

A concussive shockwave ripped through the glass partitions, shattering them into a million glittering shards that rained down across the clinical floor. Matteo reacted instantly, throwing his body over the hospital bed to shield the sleeping toddler from the flying glass.

Through the choking cloud of white drywall dust and cordite smoke, the hunters entered.

They did not rush; they moved with the slow, terrifying certainty of reapers. Six operators from the Null Directive, flanked by two towering figures in experimental combat armor carrying heavy suppression shields.

Behind them walked Celeste Pendelton.

Her face was transformed. Her broken nose had been crudely taped, her cheek bruised purple and black, but in her eyes burned an unhinged, psychopathic euphoria. In her right hand, she carried a military-grade submachine gun; in her left, an electronic tablet showing Owen's real-time biometric heartbeat.

"Look at this touching little family portrait," Celeste laughed, her voice cracked and shrill. "A traitorous mother, a broken soldier, an orphan stray, and the little rat who stole my birthright."

Victoria stood forward, attempting to summon the majestic authority that had once ruled multinational conglomerates. "Celeste! Stand down this instant! You have no idea what the Board will do once they have that code! They will exterminate us all!"

*Crack.*

Celeste fired a single shot.

The bullet struck Victoria Pendelton directly in the center of her chest.

The matriarch of the Pendelton dynasty gasped, looking down at the red bloom spreading across her silk blouse with an expression of stunned disbelief. She reached out toward her daughter, her fingers trembling, before her knees buckled and she collapsed backward onto the shattered glass.

"Mother," Celeste sneered, lowering the smoking barrel. "Always giving advice nobody asked for."

"You killed your own mother," Valentina whispered, rising slowly from behind the steel counter, her eyes fixed on Celeste with lethal intent.

"She outlived her usefulness," Celeste shrugged, stepping over Victoria’s twitching body. "Just like you have, Valentina. Secure the child. Exterminate the rest."

The two armored shield-bearers advanced, their heavy boots crushing the glass beneath them.

"Now, Matteo!" Valentina yelled.

Matteo didn't aim at the soldiers. With his remaining strength, he raised his sidearm and fired three rapid rounds directly into the overhead high-pressure liquid nitrogen lines running along the ceiling.

The heavy steel pipes ruptured with a deafening screech.

A blinding cloud of minus-three-hundred-degree nitrogen gas blasted down like a frozen hurricane directly into the path of the advancing strike team. The extreme cold flash-froze the carbon-weave armor of the two shield-bearers, turning the high-tech alloy as brittle as spun sugar.

Valentina seized a twenty-pound steel oxygen canister from the wall rack. With a roar born of pure adrenaline, she hurled it with all her might into the frozen shield of the lead operative.

The impact was catastrophic. The frozen shield shattered into thousands of razor-sharp fragments, the concussive force knocking the lead soldiers backward into their own ranks.

"Matteo, get Owen!" Valentina screamed, drawing her combat knife from her boot as she lunged into the blinding fog of freezing gas.

She didn't fight for survival. She didn't fight for money. She fought as the shield of an innocent child who had known nothing but cruelty from the day he was born.

She collided with the first operative in the fog, ducking beneath his rifle sweep and driving her blade straight up beneath his ballistic collar. The man went down with a gurgling choke. She stripped the sidearm from his holster in a fluid, seamless motion, firing four rounds through the smoke at the silhouetted shapes behind him.

Cries of pain echoed through the freezing haze.

"Celeste!" Valentina shouted, her voice echoing off the reinforced concrete like thunder. "This ends today!"

Through the thinning mist, Celeste stood alone near the blasted doorway, her face pale with sudden, terrifying realization. Her elite strike team was down or disoriented.