The silence of my penthouse office felt heavy, suffocating. I sat behind a desk carved from solid obsidian, the blue glow of my monitors reflecting off the cold glass. Hannah’s words echoed in my mind like a gunshot: Growing up without her father actually being there.

"Don't do it, Victor," Hannah whispered, her weapon still raised, her finger resting lightly against the trigger guard. Her hands didn't tremble.

"You're outnumbered, outgunned, and out of options, Mr. Vance," Cole smiled, walking slowly down the iron steps, his shoes clanging against the metal grid. "The global data leak was an impressive parting gift, I'll give you that. You thought you could democratize my research and walk away into the sunset with the scientist's daughter. But biology is proprietary, Victor. And you are holding stolen property."

I kept my eyes locked on Cole, calculating trajectories, wind shear through the broken windows, and the reaction times of the operatives flanking him. In my prime, I could take three men down before their safety catches clicked off. But with Hannah standing right beside me, the margin for error shrank to absolute zero.

"You want the research back?" I said, my voice steady, deliberately drawing Cole's attention away from Hannah. "It's already in the public domain, Cole. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Every university hospital on earth has the gene-sequence maps."

"The raw data, yes," Cole sneered, stopping ten feet away from us. "But the delivery vector—the proprietary viral vector Arthur engineered to splice the regenerative RNA without triggering an autoimmune collapse—that was encrypted on a physical hard drive. And you brought it with you, didn't you?"

Cole’s gaze shifted past my shoulder toward the tactical backpack Hannah wore over her shoulders.

"Hand over the drive, Hannah," Cole said smoothly, his voice dropping into a manipulative, paternal cadence. "Your father was a tragic casualty of a war he wasn't equipped to fight. Join us. We can restore your family's name, fund your research legitimately, and give you the resources your father was denied."

Hannah stared at Cole. For three seconds, the lighthouse went completely silent, save for the rhythmic crashing of the Atlantic waves against the stone foundation below.

"My father died because men like you viewed human life as a commodity," Hannah said, her voice cutting through the damp air like a razor blade. "He didn't want an army. He wanted children to walk."

She didn't reach for her backpack. Instead, her hand flashed downward with blinding speed, snatching the submachine gun from her hip.

I moved simultaneously, firing two rapid rounds straight into the chest of the operative on the left gallery, while Hannah’s first burst of suppressed fire caught the second operative square in the shoulder, spinning him off the iron railing into the stone floor below.