Chapter 30 - The Countdown Beneath the Frost
"Do you understand now, Clara?" Vittorio’s voice hissed through the phone, vibrating with a venom that had fermented across half a century. "Arthur Vance didn't steal our syndicate's money forty years ago. He stole my brother’s wife. He stole *you*."
The room seemed to tilt beneath my boots. The wooden floorboards of my father’s house felt as fragile as thin ice over a fathomless abyss.
"You're lying," I choked out, staring at the photograph on the granite counter.
"Ask your Marshals," Vittorio whispered. "Ask Agent Reyes why the Marshals Service responded to an alert from a farm that was supposedly decommissioned forty years ago. You were never Arthur Vance’s biological daughter, Clara. You were the genetic collateral that kept the Dumas syndicate from annihilating Arthur thirty years ago."
I looked up at Agent Reyes.
The federal agent hadn't moved. His hand remained resting on the butt of his sidearm. But the expression in his gray eyes had changed. The warm, protective professionalism was gone. In its place was the flat, dead gaze of a man guarding a prisoner who didn't know she was behind bars.
"Reyes?" I whispered, taking a slow step backward toward the shattered bay window. "What is he talking about?"
Reyes didn't answer. He reached into his tactical vest, pulled out a small black electronic transponder, and pressed the master toggle.
Down beneath the floorboards, deep within the subterranean bunker I had just climbed out of, an automated siren began to wail—a rhythmic, deafening, low-frequency pulse that shook the foundations of the house.
*KLIEG-KLIEG-KLIEG.*
A synthesized feminine voice echoed up through the floor grates:
*FACILITY DECOMMISSIONING PROTOCOL INITIATED. CORE DESTRUCT SEQUENCE: NINE MINUTES AND FIFTY SECONDS. ZERO GROUND ESCAPE AUTHORIZATION.*
Outside the window, through the blinding glare of the Black Hawk spotlights, the rear doors of the tactical transport didn't lift into the air.
Instead, the helicopter rotors throttled down into an idle whine.
The six tactical operators who had supposedly rescued my daughter weren't securing the perimeter. They were setting perimeter claymore mines around the perimeter of the farmhouse, pointing inward toward the porch.
The phone in my hand clicked.
A new voice spoke—not from the telephone speaker, but from the darkness of the front foyer, stepping through the shadow of the grandfather clock with snow melting on his leather trench coat.
"You really should have left the house when I texted you, Clara," Ethan said softly.
He wasn't beaten. His eye wasn't swollen. There were no bruises on his face, no zip-ties on his wrists, and no fear in his eyes.
May you like
Tucked under his arm was a leather briefcase, and resting in his right hand was a sound-suppressed semi-automatic pistol pointed directly at my throat.
"You always were too sentimental for your own good," Ethan smiled, cocking the hammer back with a clean, fatal click. "Now... tell me where Arthur hid the key."
