Chapter 4
Screams finally erupted. The guests shattered like dropped glass, scattering in every direction, diving behind marble pillars, overturning tables of hors d’oeuvres, and scrambling toward the locked front doors.
“Control the room!” Fiona shouted into a comms unit hidden in her ear.
Heavy footsteps thundered into the entrance hall. Three men dressed in black tactical gear, carrying suppressed submachine guns, stormed in from the west wing. They immediately raised their weapons, screaming at the guests to get on the floor.
Chaos. Absolute, bloody chaos.
But in the center of it all, my medical training took over.
Heart rate: 110. Adrenaline spiking. Breathe in. Breathe out. Protect the child.
I dropped to my knees, ignoring the searing pain in my lower back and the violent kick of my daughter protesting the sudden movement. I scrambled across the marble floor toward Elias, who was clutching his bleeding shoulder, leaning against the base of a Greek statue.
“Let me see,” I demanded, pulling his hand away.
Blood was pulsing, but it wasn’t a geyser. The brachial artery was intact. It was a through-and-through flesh wound.
“I’m fine,” Elias grunted, his teeth gritted. He looked at me, his eyes burning with a strange intensity. “You set a hell of a trap, Serena.”
“I thought I was trapping a cheating husband,” I whispered, ripping the silk sash from my burgundy maternity dress. “I didn’t realize I was trapping a cartel.”
I wrapped the silk sash tightly around his bicep, applying direct pressure. “Hold this.”
“What’s your plan?” Elias asked, pressing his hand over mine.
“I have the architectural plans memorized,” I said softly, watching as the tactical team began herding the sobbing guests into the center of the room. Matthias was on his knees, weeping openly, his hands raised in the air. “There’s a service corridor behind the coat check. It leads to the old wine cellar, which connects to the ventilation shafts above the vault.”
“You’re pregnant,” Elias pointed out grimly. “You can’t crawl through a ventilation shaft.”
“I don’t need to,” I said. “I just need to get to the breaker panel in the cellar. The backup lights are running on a localized grid. If I short it out, the entire house goes black. Completely blind. These guys don’t have night vision goggles. They’re wearing standard tactical masks.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because if they were expecting total darkness, they would have dropped the lights themselves. They only killed the main power. They want to be able to see.”
“Silence!” Fiona’s voice cracked like a whip. She stood over Matthias, the gun pointed at the back of his head. “Arthur! Get over here. Now.”
Arthur Dre, trembling violently, crawled across the floor toward his son.
“The code,” Fiona demanded. “Or your bloodline ends tonight.”
“Fiona, please,” Matthias sobbed. “I gave you everything. I bought you that necklace. I loved you.”
Fiona looked down at him with utter disgust. “The necklace was a Trojan horse, Matthias. A hardware bypass for the vault’s biometric scanner. I needed you to bring it inside the perimeter because my employers knew your wife’s security systems would detect it on anyone else. You were a mule. Nothing more.”
The humiliation on Matthias’s face was almost worse than the fear. Almost.
I looked at Elias. “When the lights go out, hit the man on the left. Take his weapon.”
“And you?”
“I’m getting us out of here.”
May you like
I didn’t wait for his response. Using the chaos of Arthur’s weeping as cover, I rolled backward, slipping behind the massive velvet curtains that draped the entrance to the coat check.
My breath was loud in my own ears. My feet, still shoved into those agonizing heels, were silently kicked off, leaving me barefoot on the freezing hardwood floor. The cold shocked my system, grounding me.
