Chapter 8 - The Weight of a Choice
The silence in the underground vault became absolute.
My breath caught in my throat. My mother. They had found her location. The photographs from three weeks ago weren't just a warning; they were an ongoing surveillance operation.
“You wouldn't dare,” I whispered, stepping around Vincent’s shoulder.
“Try me, Bridget,” Frankie laughed, though there was a frantic edge to it now as he noticed Vincent’s finger tightening slightly on the trigger guard. “You think Silas plays fair? You think he cares about collateral damage? You give us the ledger, and I make a phone call. Your mother stays safe in her room, eating her oatmeal tomorrow morning.”
“And if I don't?” I demanded, my voice trembling with a fury I didn't know I possessed.
“Then your brother Owen loses more than just his gambling privileges,” Frankie said coldly. “And your mother stops receiving her medication by sunrise.”
Vincent didn't hesitate.
In one fluid, blinding movement, he didn't shoot Frankie—he lunged forward, grabbed the edge of the heavy oak desk, and flipped it violently onto its side, sending ledgers, dust, and metal lamps crashing across the floor.
Frankie cursed, diving behind a shelving unit as a bullet from Vincent’s Glock punched through the metal partition where his head had been a second before.
“Run!” Vincent shouted over his shoulder, his eyes fixed on the shelving unit.
“Vincent, my mother—”
“I said run!” Vincent barked, firing a second suppression shot into the shelf. “There’s an emergency exit at the end of the maintenance tunnel behind those filing cabinets. It leads straight down to the shoreline boathouse. Go!”
Frankie fired back blindly from behind the shelving, the sharp crack of a pistol deafening in the confined stone room. Plaster dust rained down from the ceiling.
I looked at the dark tunnel opening revealed behind the heavy metal cabinets as Vincent shoved them aside with brute force. I looked at Vincent—broad-shouldered, bleeding slightly from a graze on his forearm, standing between me and a syndicate that wanted everything my family had ever built.
I didn't run to the tunnel.
Instead, I dropped the heavy revolver onto the floor, grabbed the leather-bound ledger my father had written in twenty-eight years ago, and clutched it against my chest.
“If I go,” I shouted over the gunfire, “they'll just kill both of us!”
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Vincent caught my arm, his pale gray eyes burning with an intensity that burned away every ounce of my fear.
“They won't kill you, Bridget,” Vincent said, his voice dropping into a fierce, absolute conviction. “Because you’re the only person who knows how to read your father's cipher. And I am not letting you go.”
