Chapter 11 - The Echo of a Heartbeat
Lucas hit the ground floor in a dead roll, coming up firing with both hands.
The deafening roar of 9mm rounds shredded the air. Victor dove behind a heavy marble pillar as bullets chipped away stone fragments in blinding clouds of dust. Hector Vance, moving with shocking, feral speed despite his size, drew a customized sawed-off shotgun and fired a spray of buckshot that tore through the staircase behind Lucas.
"Die, King!" Vance roared, his voice a guttural, wet rasp through his ruined, silver-toothed mouth.
Lucas slid across the blood-slick marble floor, ducking under the blast, and unloaded four rapid shots directly into Vance’s right thigh and torso. Vance bellowed in agony, the heavy-caliber impacts driving him down to one knee, dark arterial blood spraying onto the white tile.
Before Vance could raise the shotgun again, Lucas closed the distance, kicking the weapon out of his grip with a brutal snap. He drew a combat knife from his hip and drove the blade down through Vance’s collarbone, pinning the giant mercenary to the floor.
Vance gasped, choking on blood, his silver teeth clicking wildly in pain.
Behind him, Victor stepped out from behind the pillar, his submachine gun aimed straight at the back of Lucas's skull.
"Game over, Lucas," Victor sneered, his finger tightening on the trigger.
*BOOM.*
A deafening blast ripped through the foyer.
Victor’s eyes widened in utter disbelief. He looked down at his chest, where a massive, ragged hole had obliterated his sternum. Behind him, Marco stood battered and bleeding against the dining room double doors, smoke drifting lazily from the barrel of his Benelli shotgun.
Victor collapsed to his knees, his weapon clattering across the marble. He looked up at Lucas one last time, blood bubbling at the corner of his lips, before falling face-first onto the shattered floor, lifeless.
The house fell into an abrupt, eerie silence, save for the crackling of the fire at the front gates and the heavy, ragged breathing of the survivors.
Lucas stood over Hector Vance, who was pinned beneath his blade, coughing up thick, crimson foam.
"It's finished, Vance," Lucas whispered, his eyes cold as ice. "Victor is dead. Your men are dead. Tell me Isabella didn't suffer at the end, and I’ll make this quick."
Vance let out a broken, wet laugh that sounded like gravel grinding in a cement mixer. His silver teeth were stained deep red as he looked up into Lucas’s face with a mockery of triumph.
"You... you stupid, arrogant bastard," Vance wheezed, his grip on Lucas’s wrist weakening. "You think... you think she died in that hospice?"
Lucas froze, his hand tightening on the hilt of the knife. "What did you say?"
"The woman in Beacon... wasn't Isabella," Vance sputtered, blood spraying from his lips. "It was... her sister. A decoy... to throw my hounds off the trail so the girl could run."
Lucas’s heart stopped. "Where is Isabella?"
Vance’s silver teeth flashed in the dim red emergency light one last time. "Victor didn't tell you... because he wanted her for himself. She’s alive, Lucas. Locked in a shipping container... at the old ironworks in Newark. But the timer... Victor wired it to his heartbeat monitor."
Lucas’s gaze whipped toward Victor’s dead body ten feet away. Around Victor’s wrist was a military-grade biometric watch.
The digital screen on the watch was flashing a bright, pulsing red:
*PULSE FLATLINE DETECTED. DETONATION SEQUENCE INITIATED.*
*COUNTDOWN: 14:59... 14:58... 14:57...*
At that exact second, Lucas’s encrypted satellite phone vibrated violently against his chest.
He ripped it out of his pocket and tapped the screen. A live surveillance feed flickered to life.
Inside a rusted, dimly lit steel container, a woman with tangled dark hair was chained to an iron pillar. Her clothes were threadbare, her face pale and bruised, but as the camera zoomed in, she weakly lifted her head toward the ceiling light.
Those eyes.
Those unmistakable, emerald-green eyes that had haunted Lucas’s dreams every night for six long years.
Isabella took a ragged, wheezing breath, her cracked lips moving silently against the steel collar around her neck. On the wall directly behind her, a digital block of C4 plastic explosives was counting down in sync with Victor’s watch:
*14:45... 14:44... 14:43...*
Below, in the sub-basement bunker, Mia’s voice suddenly crackled through Lucas’s tactical radio earpiece, small and trembling with hope:
May you like
"Daddy? Did you beat the monsters? Can Mama come home now?"
Lucas stared at the ticking countdown, Newark being a thirty-minute drive through the snow, with only fourteen minutes before the only woman he ever loved was blown off the face of the earth.
