Chapter 9 - The Price of Survival
The silence that followed was deafening, punctuated only by the groaning of the two men tangled at the bottom of the stairs and Dad's heavy, wheezing breaths.
"Elias..." Dad gasped, his hand clutching his chest as he leaned heavily against the wall. His knuckles were bleeding where he had struck the banister.
"I’ve got the gun," I said, dropping the doorstop and scooping the snub-nosed revolver off the hallway floor. The cold steel felt heavy and unnatural in my palm, but the weight steadied my racing heart. I leveled it down the stairwell.
At the bottom, Frank shoved Leo’s groaning body aside. The older enforcer pushed himself up, wiping blood from his split lip. He looked up at me, staring down the barrel of his partner’s weapon, and for the first time, the boredom was gone from his eyes. Instead, there was a cold, venomous calculations.
"You're making this a murder charge, kid," Frank said, his voice dropping to a gravelly rasp. "You shoot, and Vane will bury your whole family in a trench in the pine barrens."
"Nobody’s shooting if you walk out that door right now," I said, my voice steady despite the adrenaline roaring in my ears. "The police were dialed from my cell phone five minutes ago on silent dispatch. They’re already rolling three cruisers down Maple Street."
It was a bluff. My phone was in my jacket on the kitchen counter downstairs. But Frank couldn't know that.
Frank stared at me for three long, agonizing seconds. Then, slowly, he glanced down at Leo, who was clutching a broken collarbone and moaning on the floor.
"Marcus," Frank called out softly, not breaking eye contact with me. "You hear me in there? You have forty-eight hours to put eighty thousand dollars in an escrow account, or we come back with ten men and three gallons of kerosene. You think this kid with a gun can stay awake for forty-eight hours? You think your old man's heart can take another week?"
Inside the bedroom, Chloe was hyperventilating, her sobbing muffled against the mattress. Marcus was silent as a corpse.
Frank reached down, grabbed Leo by the collar of his jacket, and hauled him to his feet with brute strength. He dragged his limping partner backward through the splintered frame of the front door, stepping out into the freezing November rain.
"Forty-eight hours, Elias," Frank said, lingering for one final second in the threshold. "Look up the deed. See who really owns the roof over your head."
Then, the heavy night swallowed them, followed seconds later by the wet screech of tires on asphalt as a black sedan sped away into the dark.
I stood at the top of the stairs, the revolver lowered at my side, my legs trembling so violently I had to lean against the wall to keep from falling.
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Beside me, Dad slid down against the hallway baseboard, his ash-wood cane rolling away across the floor. He covered his face with his calloused, trembling hands, and the man who had ruled this house with an iron fist for thirty years began to weep.
"What have I done?" Dad whispered into his palms, his voice breaking. "My God... what did I almost do to you, Elias?"
