Chapter 5 - Inside the Vault
The panic room was roughly the size of a luxury hotel suite, lined with weapon racks, communication arrays, and multiple high-definition monitors showing every corner of the burning, besieged estate outside.
Jonah sat in his chair beside the central console, his chest rising and falling in heavy, ragged breaths, his hands gripping the armrests so hard his knuckles were translucent. The sheer frustration of his body’s betrayal radiated off him in waves of dark, stifling heat.
Riley stood near the reinforced door, pressing her back against the cool steel, trying to quiet the wild thumping of her own heart.
“You shouldn't have stayed,” Jonah whispered, his voice dangerously low, stripped of all its usual authority, revealing the raw, jagged edges of a man trapped inside a broken cage. “If they breach the house, they don't take prisoners. You became a target the second you walked through those front gates.”
“Well,” Riley said, her voice shaking slightly despite her best efforts to sound brave as she reached into her pocket and pulled out a crushed granola bar, tearing it open with trembling fingers. “I’ve always had terrible career instincts.”
Jonah looked up at her, a strange, dark shadow crossing his face. On the central monitor, the camera feed from the grand foyer showed three masked men in tactical gear kicking open the front double doors, sweeping the marble hallway with assault rifles, smashing antique vases, and shouting orders in low, clipped tones.
“Moretti sent his cleanup crew,” Jonah muttered, his eyes narrowing into slits of pure ice. He reached out with a steady hand, tapping a sequence onto the bunker’s master control console. “He thinks because I can't walk, the empire is ripe for the taking.”
“What are you doing?” Riley asked, stepping closer to the screen.
“Calling in a foreclosure,” Jonah replied softly.
He pressed a red emergency toggle switch embedded beneath a sliding glass cover on the console.
Miles away, down at the Baltimore docks and across three key shipping hubs controlled by Vince Moretti’s syndicate, synchronized federal raids—backed by quiet tips from an anonymous source inside the Mercer network—were already moving in to seize every ledger, container, and shell corporation Moretti owned.
But inside the house, physical survival came first.
On the monitor, one of the masked intruders stepped directly toward the hidden bookcase leading to the master suite, raising the barrel of his rifle as he noticed the fresh scuff marks on the hardwood floor.
Jonah reached down to the lower shelf of the console, his hand closing around the cold, checkered grip of a Sig Sauer P226 pistol. He locked the slide back with a sharp, metallic click, checked the magazine, and slid the weapon smoothly across the smooth steel table toward Riley.
She stared at the gun as if it were a venomous snake.
“I don't know how to shoot a gun,” she whispered, her eyes wide.
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“You won't have to,” Jonah said, his voice dropping into an absolute, terrifying calm as he maneuvered his wheelchair slightly to face the inner security breach point. “Just hold it, keep your breathing steady, and if anyone gets past this door before Frank regroups the perimeter units... you point it at the center of mass and pull the trigger until it goes click.”
Riley looked from the heavy steel door to Jonah’s cold, unyielding gray eyes—and realized, with a sudden, shivering jolt, that she was standing beside a man who would burn the entire city of Baltimore to the ash heap before he ever let anyone take him alive.
