Chapter 3 - WHEN THE DEAD COME KNOCKING
Bridget's blood ran cold.
She kept her face entirely blank, a survival instinct she didn't know she possessed kicking in with violent force. She stood up slowly, putting her body between Gabriel and her daughter.
"She's too tired," Bridget said, her voice remarkably steady. "She can't make sense of the patterns right now. She needs sleep."
Gabriel studied Bridget’s face, his eyes narrowing slightly. He was a man who survived by reading the subtlest shifts in human behavior, but Bridget’s desperation was a powerful shield.
"Very well," Gabriel said, after a agonizing pause. "My house manager will show you to your quarters. We will begin first thing in the morning."
The guest suite was luxurious, but to Bridget, it felt like a high-tech prison cell. The windows were reinforced glass that didn't open, and she could hear the subtle, rhythmic hum of the surveillance cameras hidden in the corners of the ceiling.
As soon as the door clicked shut, Bridget dragged a heavy armchair in front of the door. It wouldn't stop a security team, but it would buy her seconds. She hurried to the bed where Lila was sitting, her knees pulled to her chest.
"Lila, look at my mouth," Bridget whispered, blocking the angle of the ceiling cameras with her own back. "Are you absolutely sure about what the book said?"
Lila nodded quickly, her lips barely moving as she replied. "Daddy's writing has a special code. He told me if I ever saw the circles with the double lines, it meant 'bad man.' The book says Gabriel sold Daddy to the people who wanted to hurt him. And Mommy... there's more."
"What else?"
"Daddy wrote that he didn't die in the crash. He wrote that he had to go into the dark to build a trap."
Before Bridget could process the sheer, mind-bending implication of her husband being alive, the lights in the entire estate suddenly went pitch black.
The ambient hum of the security system died. The air conditioning fell silent.
A split second later, the backup generators failed to kick in. The red emergency lights flashed once, twice, and then sputtered out into absolute darkness.
From somewhere down the hall, the muffled thwip-thwip-thwip of silenced automatic gunfire echoed through the heavy walls.
"Lila, under the bed, now!" Bridget hissed, grabbing her daughter and shoving her beneath the heavy wooden frame.
The door to their suite didn't just open; it was blown off its hinges with a controlled, localized breaching charge. The heavy oak door slammed into the armchair Bridget had placed there, sending splinters flying through the room.
Two figures clad in tight, matte-black tactical gear slid into the room. They wore night-vision goggles that glowed with a ghostly green light. They didn't speak. One of them swept a rifle across the room while the other moved directly toward the bed.
Bridget didn't think. She grabbed a heavy brass lamp from the bedside table and lunged from the shadows, swinging it with all the terrified force of a mother protecting her child.
The lamp shattered against the side of the first tactical operative's helmet. He stumbled back, grunting, but didn't fall. Before he could raise his weapon, a third figure stepped through the ruined doorway.
This figure was taller, broader, and moved with a terrifyingly familiar gait. He raised a silenced pistol and shot both of the tactical operatives in the back of the neck. They fell to the floor, instantly paralyzed by high-dosage tranquilizer darts.
The tall figure reached up, pulling off his tactical mask and night-vision goggles.
The moonlight filtered through the large windows, illuminating a face covered in jagged, pale burn scars. But beneath the disfigurement, the wire-rimmed glasses were gone, replaced by cold, hardened eyes.
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It was David.
"Bridget," he said, his voice deeper and rougher than she remembered. He looked at her with a mixture of intense pain and desperate hope. "I told you to stay in the apartment. Why did you bring her here?"
