Chapter 2 - THE SMOKE AND THE MIRRORThe study door exploded inward in a shower of splintered wood and iron.
Two men in black tactical gear poured through the threshold, assault rifles raised. They didn't shout warnings. They swept the room with deadly precision.
Victor didn't hesitate. Moving with terrifying speed for a man who owned empires instead of fighting in the trenches, he rolled out from behind the desk. Two muffled thwacks echoed in rapid succession. The lead gunman jerked violently and crashed face-first onto the Persian rug.
The second gunman swung his barrel toward Victor, but I screamed and hurled a heavy crystal paperweight across the room. It clipped the mercenary’s shoulder, throwing his aim off by a fraction of an inch.
That fraction was all Victor needed. A third shot tore through the air, and the second attacker collapsed.
"Hannah! Grab my belt!" Victor barked, grabbing me by the arm and hauling me to my feet. "If we stay in this room, we die!"
We bolted through a hidden side panel behind the bookshelf that opened into a narrow, dark utility corridor. As the secret door clicked shut behind us, muffled shouts echoed from the study as reinforcements swarmed the room.
"Where are we going?" I panted, clutching Lily, whose breathing was becoming agonizingly shallow. The fever was spiking again.
"To the underground vault," Victor said, his flashlight cutting through the pitch-black tunnel. "It’s a fallout shelter built during the Cold War. It has its own medical bay, secure satellite comms, and an armored exit leading to the river."
"Why are they doing this now?" I demanded, adrenaline overriding my terror. "If my mother hid us, why did they find us tonight?"
Victor paused at a heavy steel bulkhead door, punching a complex numerical sequence into the biometric keypad. The door hissed open, releasing a blast of cool, sterile air.
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"Because tonight was your supervisor's final report," Victor said grimly, pressing a button that sealed the vault door with a thunderous lock. "I own the security company your boss contracted with. When he flagged a cleaner bringing an unauthorized infant into a high-security estate, facial recognition ran the baby's thermal and facial structure through an old, classified intelligence database I keep hidden."
He turned to me, his dark eyes haunted. "The moment the system cross-referenced Lily’s facial geometry with Elena Rossi’s DNA markers, an encrypted ping went out to the highest bidder in the global underworld. Someone inside my own security network sold us out."
