Chapter 6 - Safe House in the Pines
Three days later, we were holed up in a rustic, abandoned timber cabin nestled deep in the rugged Adirondack mountains. Snow blanketed the pine trees for miles around, insulating us from the outside world.
The cabin had no running water, no cell service, and no electricity beyond a sputtering wood-burning stove and a gas generator. It was the kind of place men like me sent targets to disappear permanently.
Martha, our loyal elderly housekeeper who had insisted on coming with us, was boiling water on the iron stove for tea. The twins were wrapped in woolen blankets on a cot, coloring in new books Hannah had managed to pack into our duffel bags.
I sat at the wooden kitchen table, the satellite communicator glowing green as I ran diagnostic traces on the encrypted files Hannah had brought.
Hannah walked over, setting a steaming mug of black coffee down beside my elbow. Her hair was tied back in a messy bun, wearing an oversized flannel shirt that swallowed her frame. She looked less like an assassin's daughter and more like a normal twenty-four-year-old girl—something she should have been all along, before my world devoured her family.
"The encryption on your father's files is brilliant," I murmured, staring at the lines of genetic code scrolling across the small screen. "Even my top tech guys in Silicon Valley wouldn't have cracked this in a month."
"My father taught me well," Hannah said quietly, leaning against the rough-hewn wooden post of the kitchen archway. "He always said coding was just another language. You just have to listen to what the machine is trying to tell you."
"Just like you listened to Claire," I looked up, meeting her gaze.
She looked away, staring out the frosted window toward the endless expanse of white pine forest. "I wanted to hurt you, Victor. When I first took the job... I rehearsed what I was going to say to you a thousand times. I wanted to see you beg for mercy the way my father begged the federal agents on the day they dragged him away."
"Why didn't you?"
She turned back, her grey eyes shimmering with unshed tears. "Because on my third day here, Claire fell while trying to reach that paper moon. And instead of crying, she laughed. And I looked at her, and I saw my little sister—the one I lost when I was ten years old. I couldn't punish an innocent child just to satisfy my own ghost."
She stepped closer, resting her hands on the edge of the table.
"And then I watched you. A man everyone called a monster, dropping a billion-dollar criminal empire in ten seconds flat without a single hesitation just to get my daughters into that tunnel. Monsters don't do that, Victor."
"Men who love their children do," I replied softly.
Before she could answer, the satellite communicator on the table beeped sharply—a high-pitched, automated double-tone.
Incoming encrypted transmission. Location triangulation detected.
May you like
My body went rigid. I slammed my hand onto the keypad, routing the signal through a seven-node proxy to scramble our coordinates. But it was too late. The ping had already locked onto our IP signature.
"They found us," I whispered.
