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The sound of Clara’s heavy metal brace hitting the marble floor echoed like a gunshot in the silent ballroom. / Chapter 6 / 8

Chapter 6 - THE FALL OF HALE TOWER

Smoke and twisted steel filled the executive floor.

Out from the ruined doorway stepped Leo. His eyes were no longer dark brown; they burned with a brilliant, golden light that made the fluorescent fixtures flicker and burst overhead.

The entire floor began to tremble. Water pipes burst inside the walls, and the massive glass windows overlooking the city cracked from top to bottom.

"The debt of blood..." Leo’s voice resounded, multiplying until it sounded like a hundred voices speaking in unison. "...is due today."

The board members scrambled in terror, tripping over chairs and knocking over monitors as they fled toward the emergency stairwells.

Vanessa pulled out a small remote trigger from her blazer pocket. "I knew this might happen! I planted thermite charges on the floor below us! You won't leave this building alive, you bastard orphan!"

She slammed the button.

A series of muffled explosions rocked the forty-first floor. The steel support beams gave way, and the floor beneath Marcus and Leo began to tilt violently into the abyss!

"Marcus!" Serene’s voice cried out from the elevator lobby—she had just arrived with the twins, unaware of the trap.

"SERENE! GET THEM OUT OF HERE!" Marcus screamed, sliding down the collapsing floor toward the shattered window.

Below him was a four-hundred-foot drop into the concrete jungle.

Marcus grabbed onto a bent steel pillar, his fingers slipping on the rain-soaked metal. Vanessa was clinging to a doorframe nearby, laughing like a madwoman as the building tore itself apart.

"If the Hale name dies today, it dies with ME!" she shrieked.

Marcus lost his grip.

He plummeted into the open air.

WIND ROARED IN HIS EARS.

As he fell toward his death, a small hand reached down through the smoke and caught Marcus by the wrist.

It was Leo.

The seven-year-old child was holding the weight of a full-grown man with one arm, standing casually on a beam that was suspended in mid-air, completely defying gravity.

"Why..." Marcus gasped, staring up at the boy through the pouring rain. "Why save me? I rejected you... I used you..."

Leo looked down at him, the golden light in his eyes softening back into deep, human brown tears.

"Because when you held your children in your arms three nights ago," Leo said softly, "you loved them the way my mother loved me before they buried her. You are a foolish man, Marcus. But you are a father."

Leo pulled Marcus up with effortless strength, setting him safely on the remaining structural ledge.

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Deep inside my banking app, the little green toggle next to the automatic transfer had vanished. For forty-eight months, that button had silently pumped $2,450 out of my dwindling savings account directly into the primary mortgage servicing pool for 442 Oakridge Lane.

Deep inside my banking app, the little green toggle next to the automati...

Ethan went pale—but his mother looked terrified and whispered, “Stop her before she finds out.” That was when I realized my triplets weren’t the only secret the Montgomery family had been hiding.

Ethan went pale—but his mother looked terrified and whispered, “Stop her...

After six years away, I came home and found my mother on her knees, dressed like a maid in the house I had bought for her.

After six years away, I came home and found my mother on her knees, dres...

Then, Leo turned his head toward Vanessa, who was clinging to her dying power.

"Now," Leo whispered. "It is time to deal with the serpent."

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