Chapter 22 - The Highway West
The rented Ford sedan hummed quietly as we sped westward along Interstate 10, leaving the safety of the Atlantic coastline behind us. The afternoon sun beat down on the windshield, casting long, distorted shadows across the dashboard.
In the backseat, Oliver had fallen fast asleep against Emma’s shoulder, their breathing soft and rhythmic in the air-conditioned cabin. Emma clutched a small plastic bucket filled with seashells she had scavenged from the beach that morning, her face smudged with dried salt and sunscreen.
“Where are we going, Adrian?” I asked, keeping my voice low so as not to wake the children. My knuckles were white, gripping the edge of the passenger seat as the miles ticked away on the odometer. “We can’t just keep running. Every time we stop, every time we try to breathe, another ghost crawls out of the woodwork.”
“We aren’t running, Sophia. We’re hunting,” Adrian replied, his eyes locked on the asphalt ahead, one hand resting casually on the steering wheel while the other held a secure, encrypted satellite phone.
“You said you gave it all up!” I snapped, my frustration finally boiling over. “You told me the empire was gone, the accounts were frozen, the council was history!”
“The council is history,” Adrian agreed calmly, glancing over at me for a fraction of a second. “But an empire doesn’t just evaporate because the king steps down. When you abandon a throne, someone else sits in it. And right now, the man sitting in my old chair is trying to secure his position by tying up loose ends.”
“Us. We’re the loose ends.”
“We are the only leverage he has left,” Adrian corrected. He hit a button on the steering wheel, activating the car’s encrypted comms link. “Mateo. Report.”
A burst of static crackled through the speakers before Mateo’s gruff voice filled the cabin. “We’ve intercepted encrypted packet traffic routed from a server in Zurich through a shell company in the Cayman Islands. The Zurich accounts are active, boss. Someone is liquidating Moretti-Vasiliev joint assets to fund a private mercenary unit currently operating out of New Orleans.”
Adrian’s eyes narrowed. “New Orleans. The French Quarter?”
“Negative. The bayou checkpoints outside Thibodaux. They’re using an old shipping warehouse owned by the maritime union as a staging ground. Boss... the manifest shows they aren't just looking for leverage. They have a localized strike team.”
Adrian cut the transmission with a flick of his thumb. The silence in the car grew suffocating, heavier than the humid southern air pressing against the windows.
May you like
“New Orleans,” I whispered, a cold shiver running down my spine. “Why Louisiana?”
“Because that’s where your father’s old federal task force hid the secondary copies of the shipping ledgers,” Adrian said, his voice grim. “And whoever is pulling the strings in Zurich thinks you have them, Sophia.”
