Chapter 7 - The Final GambitVance’s eyes involuntarily darted to the heavy steel blast doors forty feet away. They were slowly descending, heavy rubber seals locking against the floor with a terrifying hiss.
That fraction of a second was all Gabriel needed.
Gabriel struck upward, catching Vance’s wrist and twisting it violently outward. The gun discharged into the ceiling with a muffled POW. Gabriel slammed an elbow into Vance’s jaw, knocking him back onto the marble steps.
Vance scrambled for the gun, but Gabriel kicked it across the slick floor, straight toward Emily.
Emily dropped to her knees, grabbed the weapon, and pointed it at Vance with both hands, her arms shaking wildly.
"Don't move!" she yelled.
Vance spat blood onto the floor, looking at the gun, then at Emily, and finally at Gabriel, who stood over him like a judge delivering a sentence.
"You played us all," Gabriel said coldly, pulling a set of heavy steel cuffs from Vance’s own belt and securing his hands behind his back. "You used my brother, you used my son, and you tried to use an innocent woman."
"It doesn't matter!" Vance sneered, gasping for air as the atmospheric pressure in the room began to drop. "The vault is sealed! We're all going to suffocate in here! You locked us in!"
Gabriel turned to Emily with a faint, rare trace of a smile. "Did you really activate the atmospheric lock?"
Emily lowered the gun slightly, wiping a line of cold sweat from her forehead. "I have no idea what that button did. I just read the label on the panel that said 'Emergency Ventilation Reset' and guessed."
Gabriel let out a short, dark laugh—the first genuine sound of amusement she had heard from him all night.
"Resourceful," Gabriel said, walking over to the main console. He tapped in a master security bypass code. The heavy blast doors stopped descending and slowly began to grind back upward, letting in the cool, crisp night air of the city streets.
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Outside, sirens echoed in the distance. Dozens of blue and red lights flashed against the wet granite walls of the banking district. The police, backed by federal agents, were finally swarming the perimeter.
"It's over," Gabriel declared.
