Chapter 42 - Blood in the Cold Water
The deafening surge of the high-capacity drainage turbine ripped through the quiet tension like a physical blow. Hundreds of gallons of pressurized lake water erupted backward through the floor grating directly beneath Marco’s combat boots, throwing his balance instantly off-center.
In that half-second window of lost equilibrium, Victor moved.
He didn't draw a gun; he became a missile. Victor lunged across the slick, soot-covered boards, slamming his entire frame into Marco’s weapon arm. The gun went off—a deafening CRACK that sent a round ricocheting off the iron crane housing above, raining sparks down onto the water.
"Lily! Drop!" Victor bellowed.
Lily didn't hesitate. She threw herself sideways behind the thick mahogany hull of the dry-docked tender, shielding Leo with her entire torso as wood splinters sprayed across her back. The infant shrieked in terror, the raw, piercing cry echoing in the enclosed cavern of the boathouse.
On the walkway, the violence was primal, intimate, and brutal.
Marco recovered faster than any common hitman. He drove his armored elbow backward into Victor’s ribs, cracking bone, then spun with a combat knife sliding seamlessly from his left forearm sheath. The blade slashed through the air, carving a jagged red line across Victor’s chest, shredding through Kevlar and wool down into muscle.
Victor didn't grunt. He didn't step back. He absorbed the slice, seized Marco’s wrist in a grip forged from pure, murderous adrenaline, and smashed the traitor’s face directly into the iron corner of an engine block.
Blood sprayed across the damp timber. Marco staggered, his nose shattered, but his training was institutional. He hooked his leg around Victor’s ankle, dragging both of them violently over the edge of the slipway into the black, freezing depths of Lake Blackwood.
*SPLASH.*
The murky water swallowed them instantly.
Lily scrambled to her knees, gasping for air, her knuckles white where she clutched the baby. "Victor!" she screamed, the sound swallowed by the howling wind and the torrential rain pouring through the shattered roof.
Beneath the surface, the struggle was silent and desperate. The icy water stung Victor’s open wounds, stealing the breath from his lungs in an agonizing shock of hypothermia. Marco was fighting like a demon, clawing at Victor’s throat, trying to pin him beneath the submerged hull of the extraction boat that was now idling outside the seawall.
Victor could see the glow of green tactical lights approaching through the black water—scuba divers from the extraction team. He had seconds before he was swarmed.
Reaching into his cuff, Victor withdrew the ceramic spike. He didn't hesitate. He drove the blade upward, under the edge of Marco’s tactical vest, sinking it deep between the fourth and fifth ribs.
Marco’s body seized. His eyes went wide behind his submerged mask, air bubbles bursting violently from his lips in a silver cloud. The traitor gripped Victor’s arm one last time, not to fight, but in a desperate, dying spasm.
Victor kicked free of the dying man’s grip, kicking off Marco’s chest to launch himself toward the surface.
He broke the water gasping, coughing up cold, brackish fluid, his fingers hooking into the splintered wood of the slipway.
"Lily!" he choked out, wiping blood and lake water from his eyes. "Get to the secondary tunnel! Now!"
Before Lily could stand, the lake gate exploded.
A high-speed tactical interceptor boat smashed through the rotten wooden barricades of the outer slips, blinding them with twin halogen searchlights. Three men in black combat wet-suits leveled automatic submachine guns directly at the dry-dock where Lily knelt with the heir to the Blackwood syndicate.
A synthesized voice projected over the boat’s exterior PA system:
May you like
"Drop the child, Ms. Adler. Or Mr. Blackwood dies where he treads water."
***
