Chapter 2 - The Ghost of Route 9"You're alive," I breathed, the words tumbling out in a mixture of profound relief and suffocating rage. "I buried you! I wept over your grave! Why?"
My father stood up, his joints popping in the quiet room. He looked at Agent Miller with a tight nod before turning his piercing gaze onto me. "Because staying dead was the only way to keep you, your wife, and your children breathing past midnight tonight, Julian."
Agent Miller moved to the door, locking it securely and drawing the heavy steel bolt. "Your father didn't just walk away from his life, Julian. He spent the last twenty-five years inside a deep-cover federal asset protection program. But two days ago, the leak came from the inside."
"What leak?" I demanded, my hands shaking as I gripped the edges of a metal desk. "What are you talking about?"
"The people your father put behind bars in the late nineties," Miller explained sharply, tapping a key on the main console. A live security feed popped up on the center monitor. It showed the front gates of the Route 9 storage facility.
Two black SUVs had just pulled up, ramming through the chain-link security gate without slowing down. Armed men in tactical gear poured out, weapons raised.
"They aren't federal agents, and they aren't mourners," my father said, walking over to a hidden wall panel and sliding it open to reveal an arsenal of suppressed firearms and tactical vests. "They are a private syndicate that has been hunting the Mercer name for a generation. And your mother... well, your mother made a choice to survive."
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"What does that mean?" I shouted, my chest tightening. "Where is my mother?!"
Raymond Mercer loaded a heavy magazine into a rifle with cold, practiced precision. "She isn't at the cemetery, Julian. She never was. The woman standing by the hearse was a decoy. And right now, the real people who killed my double are walking into our house with your wife and kids."
