Chapter 15 - The Reunion in the Dark"Julian!" I gasped, nearly dropping my phone as I rushed forward, dragging Chloe behind me.
Julian pushed himself off the pillar, wincing in pain as he clutched his injured shoulder. When he saw Chloe running toward him, his face crumpled. He dropped to his knees, scooping his daughter into his arms and burying his face in her hair, sobbing openly.
"You're alive... thank God, you're both alive," Julian choked out, holding her so tight I thought he might break her.
"How did you get out?" I asked, shining the phone's flashlight around the damp, concrete junction. "The house was swarming with them!"
"One of the undercover federal agents—Agent Vance, a real one this time—blew the back wall with a breaching charge just as they cornered me in the kitchen," Julian explained, gritting his teeth as he adjusted his arm. "We managed to neutralize three of them, but the mole inside the bureau tipped off their main cell. We can't go back to any federal safe house. Every single address is compromised."
"Then where do we go?" I asked, setting the heavy leather briefcase down on a dry concrete ledge. "Victoria's network, the syndicate... they won't stop until this ledger is destroyed and we're all dead."
Julian looked down at the battered briefcase. He reached out, popped the latches, and pulled out the red-waxed parchment document we had seen earlier.
"We don't run anymore," Julian said, his eyes hardening into a cold, dangerous resolve that I had never seen in my son before. "We take the fight straight to the head of the snake. The man who ordered Chloe's abduction isn't sitting in a warehouse in Chicago. He's attending a charity gala at the Drake Hotel downtown in less than two hours."
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I stared at him in disbelief. "A charity gala? Are you insane? We're hunted fugitives!"
"Exactly," Julian smiled grimly, pulling a set of spare car keys from his wet jacket pocket. "Nobody looks for ghosts in a room full of billionaires."
