Chapter 7 - The Trap Closes
The elevator doors flew open before they even locked into place, spilling me out into the sterile, white-tiled hallway of the medical suite.
"Ethan!" I yelled, skidding around the corner and slamming into the glass-fronted recovery room.
The room was empty.
The bedsheets were tossed back, still warm, but the room was completely abandoned. The wall-mounted medical monitors had been ripped out of their mounts, dangling by frayed, sparking wires that hissed against the linoleum.
"Claire, stay behind me!" Harrison thundered, catching up from behind and drawing his weapon with practiced speed, stepping into the doorway.
"Where is he?!" I choked out, tears hot and blinding in my eyes as I searched the empty room. "They took him! They took my brother!"
A sharp beep echoed from the console beside the ruined bed.
Harrison lunged toward it, his fingers flying across the auxiliary keyboard to pull up the security camera logs. A split-second later, a video window popped up on the main monitor.
It showed Ethan sitting up in bed, looking dazed, while two men in black tactical gear—the exact same uniforms as the hitmen on the Ohio highway—hovered over him. One of them held a damp cloth over Ethan's nose and mouth, cutting off his muffled gasp as he slumped back against the pillows.
Then, the camera angle shifted, zooming in on the face of a third man standing in the doorway.
A man wearing an expensive, bespoke Brioni suit, silver hair neatly combed back, and a cold, patrician smile that didn't reach his eyes.
Harrison’s entire body went rigid. The pistol in his hand lowered by an inch.
"Jonathan," Harrison whispered, the name tasting like poison.
"Who is that?!" I grabbed Harrison by the lapel of his suit, shaking him with a ferocity born of pure terror. "Tell me who that is!"
"Jonathan Sterling," Harrison said, his voice dangerously low, his eyes fixed on the screen. "My chief executive officer. The man who has run the daily operations of Cole-Vance for fifteen years."
On the screen, Sterling leaned down close to the camera, as if he knew Harrison was watching in real-time. He looked directly into the lens, smiled smoothly, and spoke three words before the feed cut to black:
"Bring the girl to the Hamptons. Or the boy dies in an hour."
The monitor flickered, then dissolved into a wash of static.
For a terrifying second, the world seemed to stop spinning. The billionaire, the empire, the bloodlines, the stolen history—all of it boiled down to a simple, brutal equation.
They had Ethan. And they wanted me.
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"He's taking him to the old estate," Harrison said, his jaw locked so tight a muscle ticked in his cheek. He turned to me, his gaze fierce, burning with a cold, absolute resolve. "Which means we play their game."
"No," I said, wiping the tears from my face with the back of my hand, my voice dropping into a tone that surprised even me. "We don't play their game. We burn their board to the ground."
