Chapter 5 - The River Escape
"No," I said, my hands dropping firmly onto the hand-rims of my chair, locking the wheels in place.
Luca stopped dead, turning back to look at me with a frown of dark disbelief. "Elena, this isn't a negotiation. If you stay here, we both die."
"I've spent my entire life running from things I didn't understand—believing I was abandoned, broken, and completely alone," I said, my voice rising above the distant shouting echoing from the warehouse floor below. "I am not running away from a fight I didn't start just because a man with a gun tells me to play damsel in distress!"
For three agonizing seconds, we stared at each other across the gap of twenty lost years and thirty feet of shattered glass. The tension between us was thick enough to cut with a scalpel—a volatile mix of shared blood, sudden danger, and a stubborn defiance neither of us expected the other to possess.
A heavy crash echoed from the outer office door as someone kicked it off its hinges.
"Too late for speeches," Luca muttered curses under his breath. He didn't argue further. Instead, he grabbed the back of my wheelchair, pivoting it with practiced strength toward the concealed service corridor behind his desk. "If you're staying, you're doing it my way. Move!"
We burst through the hidden service door just as a volley of automatic gunfire chewed through the drywall where we had been sitting moments before. The air in the narrow concrete corridor smelled of damp river water and industrial grease.
"End of the hall," Luca barked over the staccato rhythm of gunfire echoing behind us, one hand guiding my chair while the other kept his weapon raised and ready. "Freight lift. Press the bottom button twice."
We reached the heavy iron gate of the lift just as a shadow detached itself from the gloom at the opposite end of the corridor—a tall, dark-suited figure holding a suppressed rifle, leveling the barrel directly toward us with cold, clinical precision.
Luca didn't hesitate. He shoved my chair hard inside the lift cage, slamming his hand onto the descent button while spinning around to return fire down the dark concrete hallway.
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The heavy iron gate slammed shut between us, cutting off my view of Luca’s face as the lift dropped rapidly into the subterranean gloom toward the dark, rushing waters of the Mississippi.
The cable groaned, the damp air rushed past my face, and as the lift hit the bottom slip with a jarring thud, the emergency lights flickered on to reveal the sleek black speedboat idling in the dark water—and right beside it, waiting on the floating dock with a cold, mocking smile, stood a man holding a detonator.
