Chapter 20 - The Open Vault
Julian turned his head sideways, coughing up blood, but through the agony, a grotesque, victorious grin stretched across his lips.
"You... you stupid, blind bitch," he wheezed, his teeth stained crimson. "You thought... you thought this was about killing Luca?"
I pressed the barrel harder, grinding the metal into his bone. "Speak."
Luca arrived behind me, his footsteps echoing through the tunnel. His tuxedo was torn at the shoulder, but he was completely unharmed, his dark eyes ablaze as he looked down at his ruined cousin.
"It's over, Julian," Luca said, his voice a low, rumbling death sentence. "Whatever army you brought from Europe, it dies in this city tonight."
Julian laughed—a broken, wet sound. "My army isn't in the city, Luca. My army... was already inside."
He weakly pointed with a trembling finger toward one of the papers scattered from his briefcase.
Luca knelt down, picking up the document. As his eyes scanned the page, all the color drained from his face—a look of pure, unadulterated horror that I had never seen on him, not even when his mother had been missing.
"What is it, Luca?" I demanded, my instincts screaming that something catastrophic had just slipped past our radar.
"This isn't an attack plan for the estate," Luca whispered, his voice trembling with disbelief. "It's an extraction manifest. Signed thirty minutes ago."
"Extraction of who?"
Luca looked up, his eyes wide and completely hollow. "Mateo."
Before I could process the name, the comms unit in my ear hissed to life. It wasn't Mateo's voice.
It was Elena.
Her voice was barely a whisper, breathless and trembling with sheer terror over the encrypted channel.
"Sophie... Luca..." Elena sobbed quietly. "Mateo... he walked them right through the inner perimeter. They didn't come to kill me."
"Mother!" Luca shouted into his lapel mic, dropping to his knees. "Where are you?! What do they want?!"
"They didn't come for me, Luca..." Elena's voice broke, a chilling sob tearing through the static. "They were looking for the original bloodline records in the sub-cellar. And Sophie... oh God, Sophie... they took your sister."
The words struck my chest like a physical bullet.
*My sister.*
The sister I had spent ten years believing died in the hospital fire that burned down our family's home—the fire that Vanessa’s father had ruled an accident.
May you like
Then, over the open comms channel from the estate’s deepest vault, a calm, chillingly familiar voice came through the speaker.
"You shouldn't have left the front door unlocked, Chief," Mateo’s voice purred smoothly into my ear. "We have the girl. And the timer on the estate's foundations just hit sixty seconds."
