Chapter 4 - The Leverage Game
The drive to the city was a tense, high-speed blur.
My father had loaded the truck with specialized gear from the basement. I sat in the backseat of a stolen SUV he had taken from the mercenaries, still trying to process the fact that my quiet, gentle father was a legendary black-ops operative.
"We have to go to the police," I pleaded. "They have Aunt Sarah. We can't just storm a high-rise in the middle of the city!"
"The police chief in this district is on Richard Vance's payroll, Mia," my mother explained, her fingers busy loading ammunition magazines. "If we call them, they will cover up Sarah's death and frame your father for the slaughter at the workshop. We play by our rules now."
My father looked at me in the rearview mirror. "Mia. Robert was a bully because he was raised by a monster. Richard Vance thinks he can use family to break me, because he doesn't understand what family actually means to a man like me. I built a life of peace for you and your mother. I will burn the world down before I let anyone take it away."
We arrived at the Vance corporate headquarters—a gleaming, sixty-story glass skyscraper in the heart of the financial district.
My father parked in the underground garage. He put on a dark canvas jacket, covering his weapons.
"Martha is up there too," my mother said, checking her tablet, which was now displaying the building's security layout. "Robert's mother. She's the weak link. She knows what Richard is doing, and she's terrified of him."
"I'll handle Martha," my mother said, opening her door. "Frank, you get Sarah."
"And what about me?" I asked, refusing to be left behind again. "I'm not sitting in this car waiting to find out if my family is dead."
My father looked at me for a long moment. He saw the bruises on my neck, the fear in my eyes, but beneath it, he saw the steel.
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"You come with me," he said, handing me a small, heavy black canister of pepper spray and a tactical taser. "But you stay behind me. When we find Robert, you look him in the eye. You show him you are no longer afraid."
HOOK FOR THE NEXT CHAPTER: They bypass security with a ghost-protocol keycard Frank kept for thirty years. But as the elevator rises to the penthouse, the power suddenly cuts out. We are trapped in total darkness, and the sound of heavy metal cables snapping echoes above us.
