Chapter 5 - The Showdown at the Newark Chemical Plant
I thought the game was won. I thought I had broken him completely. But cornered rats don’t just surrender; they bite.
My encrypted phone vibrated on the mahogany table. It was an unknown number. I answered.
“Isabella.” It was Jason’s voice, but it didn’t sound human. It sounded hollow, raspy, completely unhinged. “You took my money. You took my company. Now I’m taking the only thing you care about.”
In the background, I heard the terrifying, unmistakable sound of my mother weeping.
“I’m at the Newark chemical plant,” Jason whispered. “Come alone. Or I slice her throat.”
The drive to New Jersey was a blur of calculated, icy rage. I didn’t call the police. Jason was backed into a corner, facing decades in federal prison; the sight of a badge would make him pull the trigger.
The abandoned Newark chemical plant loomed like a rotting iron corpse. The air tasted of sulfur and decay. I parked my SUV, stripped off my blazer, and stood in a skin-tight black combat suit. I grabbed a heavy aluminum briefcase from the trunk and walked into the shadows.
Very few people knew what I did before my father found me and brought me into the corporate empire. In my late teens, to survive a brutal upbringing before the wealth, I fought in the underground MMA cages of Eastern Europe. I was returning to my roots.
“You actually came alone,” Jason sneered from a rusted catwalk twenty feet above. He looked feral, his shirt torn, clutching a serrated hunting knife.
Below him, tied to a metal chair in the center of the concrete floor, was my mother. Her face was bruised, a strip of duct tape over her mouth.
“Let her go, Jason,” I said, my voice echoing in the cavernous space.
Jason whistled. From the shadows, five massive, heavily tattooed mercenaries stepped into the light. They carried steel pipes, crowbars, and heavy chains. This was who he had hired with whatever cash he had left in his pocket.
“You think you’re so smart, Isabella?” Jason cackled, descending the metal stairs. “My new partner, Davis from your board of directors, tipped me off. He wants you dead so he can take the company. He gave me the money to hire these gentlemen. Break her legs, boys.”
The leader, a giant with a scarred neck, stepped forward, slapping a lead pipe into his palm.
I didn’t flinch. I set the aluminum briefcase on the concrete and popped the latches. It didn’t contain weapons. It was packed with stacks of crisp, hundred-dollar bills.
“Jason is offering you what? Ten thousand each?” I asked, looking directly at the mercenary leader. “There is one million dollars in this case. Take it, walk away, and leave me with my husband.”
The mercenaries stopped dead. They looked at the mountain of cash, then up at Jason, who suddenly realized his fatal error. Loyalty bought with money can always be outbid.
“Don’t listen to her!” Jason shrieked. “Kill her!”
The mercenary leader scoffed, spat on the ground, and walked over to the briefcase. He snapped it shut, grabbed the handle, and gestured for his men to leave. “Pleasure doing business, lady.”
Jason was utterly alone.
Driven by sheer, animalistic panic, Jason snapped. He raised the hunting knife with a guttural roar and lunged not at me, but directly at my tied-up mother.
I exploded.
I closed the distance in a fraction of a second. I slipped inside his wild, downward thrust, clamped onto his wrist, and pivoted my hips. I applied a brutal, agonizing torque.
Snap.
Jason screamed as the bones in his forearm splintered backward. He dropped the knife. Without pausing, I swept his supporting leg and drove my combat boot directly into his kneecap with the force of a hydraulic press. The joint shattered.
Jason collapsed onto the blood-stained concrete, writhing in unimaginable agony, clutching his ruined limbs.
I knelt beside my mother, slicing the ropes with his discarded knife, pulling her into a fierce embrace as she sobbed into my shoulder.
Only then did I press the button on my watch. Within sixty seconds, the deafening wail of sirens flooded the compound. Heavily armed federal agents swarmed the warehouse, rifles raised.
They looked at the money-less mercenaries they had caught outside, and then at Jason, weeping on the floor like a broken child.
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“Jason Miller,” the lead agent said, slapping cuffs onto his unbroken wrist. “You are under arrest for corporate fraud, aggravated kidnapping, and attempted murder.”
I stood over him one last time, my breathing perfectly steady. “I told you, Jason. You’re the poorest man in New York.”
