Chapter 7 - The Hit ListI froze, the cup of warm milk slipping from my hands and shattering onto the hardwood floor.
Everyone who ever helped me escape.
"No," I gasped, stumbling up from the sofa. "That's impossible. No one helped me! I did it all by myself—I drove the car off the cliff alone!"
"Nobody survives a drop like that into Lake Michigan without inside help, Elena," Vincent said quietly, stepping away from the desk and walking toward me. "Someone gave you the keys to that old decoy car. Someone altered the police dispatch logs so the search party looked in the wrong sector. Who was it?"
Tears blurred my vision as the painful memories flooded back. "It... it was David. David Miller."
Vincent’s eyebrows knitted together. "Julian’s chief financial officer? The man who manages his offshore accounts?"
"He was Julian’s right-hand man," I wept, covering my face with my shaking hands. "He saw what Julian was doing to me behind closed doors. He smuggled the medical supplies into the basement when Julian locked me away. He was the one who helped me stage the crash so Julian would think I was dead. He risked his life to give me and Lily a chance."
"And Julian just found out," Vincent said, his voice turning ice-cold.
On the computer screen across the room, Marco stared at the intercepted data packet in horror. "Boss... the encrypted transmission wasn't just a hit list. It was an automated kill switch sent to Julian’s elite black-ops squad. The timestamp on the file says..."
Marco looked up, panic flashing in his eyes. "They hit David’s safehouse fifteen minutes ago."
My breath caught in my throat. "David..."
"Marco, patch me into the city traffic surveillance grid around David Miller’s downtown residence," Vincent ordered sharply, grabbing his leather jacket from the coat rack.
"Trying, Boss, but the local precinct has locked down the entire district under federal jurisdiction. Wait—I’m bypassing their firewall now..."
The large wall monitor flickered, shifting from a static encryption screen to a live security feed from a downtown Chicago alleyway.
The image was grainy, illuminated only by the harsh glare of a streetlamp in the pouring rain. A sleek black sedan was parked sideways against a brick wall, its doors hanging wide open. Sirens wailed in the background.
And lying facedown on the wet asphalt beside the car was a man in a business suit, surrounded by a dark pool of blood.
David.
I let out a ragged, agonizing sob, falling to my knees as the harsh reality hit us. Julian wasn't just playing a political game. He was slaughtering anyone connected to my past to ensure his dark secrets never saw the light of day.
May you like
Vincent walked over, knelt beside me, and placed a firm, grounding hand on my shoulder.
"He's waging a war on our terms now," Vincent said, his voice a low, lethal promise. He stood up, looking at Marco and the rest of his armed men who had gathered in the room. "Pack up the heavy gear. We're going back to Chicago."
