Chapter 6 - The Lake Michigan TrapInside the pitch-black panic room, illuminated only by the cold, blue light of her smartphone screen, Bella stared at the message from across the world.
They found us. Run.
How could he possibly know what was happening in real-time? Unless... the entire attack wasn't a surprise breach at all.
A terrifying realization washed over her. Lucas hadn't been caught off guard in Rotterdam. He had engineered the breach. He had left the security grid vulnerable just long enough to draw Sal Moretti’s inner circle out into the open, using her and the penthouse as live bait to purge his final rivals in one decisive, bloody sweep.
She wasn't his wife. She wasn't even a hostage. She was a chess piece—sacrificial bait in a war for complete control of Chicago.
A sudden, violent pounding echoed against the steel door of the panic room, followed by the high-pitched whine of a diamond-tipped industrial torch cutting through the reinforced hinges. Sparks showered through the tiny gap at the top of the frame. Victor Moretti’s voice screamed through the metal, muffled but dripping with murderous rage:
“Open the fucking door, you little bitch! I’m going to carve that baby out of you piece by piece!”
Bella’s breath hitched. She looked around the cramped panic room. It was stocked with emergency rations, medical supplies, and a secondary communications console. But more importantly, embedded in the back wall was a secondary exit hatch—a maintenance chute designed for emergency structural evacuations, leading directly down an internal drainage pipe straight to the underground service tunnels beneath the Chicago River.
She didn't hesitate.
Bracing her swollen body against the narrow shaft, she squeezed her way into the cold, damp metal tube, pulling the hatch shut behind her just as the steel vault door blew inward with a deafening roar of explosives.
Sliding down the vertical chute in total darkness, scraping her elbows and knees against the corrugated steel, Bella hit the bottom with a hard thud, landing squarely in the ankle-deep, freezing runoff water of the subterranean service tunnels.
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The air smelled of rust, stagnant river water, and diesel exhaust. Above her, muffled explosions and gunfire echoed through the structural foundations of the skyscraper. Lucas’s trap had sprung. The war for Chicago was being fought right above her head.
Clutching her belly, gasping for breath in the damp chill, Bella began to run blindly down the winding concrete corridor toward the old port docks, knowing only one thing for certain: when the dust cleared, she would make sure both Lucas Drake and Sal Moretti paid the ultimate price for treating her life like collateral damage.
