Chapter 9 - Awakening
The nursery was dark, save for the soft, pale moonlight filtering through the barred windows. Rosalyn and Camille were huddled together in the corner of the sleigh bed, shivering in their thin pajamas, their eyes wide with sheer terror at the sound of gunfire echoing through the corridor.
“Daddy?” Rosalyn’s small, weak voice trembled in the dark.
I rushed across the room, dropping to my knees beside the bed, pulling both of my little girls into my arms. They felt impossibly light—fragile little birds wrapped in paper-thin skin—but they were alive. They were warm.
“I’ve got you, my sweet girls,” I choked out, tears finally breaking free, streaming hot and fast down my cheeks. “I’m right here. Daddy’s got you. You’re never going to be hungry again.”
Camille buried her face in my shoulder, clutching her torn stuffed rabbit tightly against my chest. “Is the bad lady gone?” she whispered.
“She’s gone,” I promised fiercely.
Behind me, Sarah was already at the barred window, using a heavy iron wrench she had brought from the maintenance closet to wedge against the vertical steel bars. “Ethan, help me! We need to pop these welds before Hilda overrides the internal power grid.”
I set the girls down gently, turning to help Sarah. Together, we threw our combined weight against the rusted, moisture-weakened anchor points of the window frame. With a sharp, metallic screech of tearing iron, the entire security grate gave way, tumbling outward into the soft garden dirt below.
At that exact moment, the heavy oak nursery door shuddered under a massive, violent impact.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Miller was using a heavy tactical battering ram to smash through the reinforced steel frame.
“Open this door, Mr. Vance!” Hilda’s voice shrieked from the other side, stripped of all its calm, professional veneer, sounding shrill, desperate, and feral. “You can’t stop what’s coming! The house is locked down! The federal wiretaps are blocked!”
“Are they, Hilda?” I shouted back over the deafening crashes of the battering ram, pulling out my satellite phone and hitting the final execution key.
May you like
High above the estate, Calvin Pierce’s independent satellite relay flashed a brilliant green pulse of data straight to the regional Federal Marshals command center in downtown Nashville, transmitting every encrypted financial record, every toxicology report, and every illegal surveillance log straight to their tactical servers.
Outside, the quiet night air suddenly shattered, not with the sound of more guards, but with the roar of heavy diesel engines, screaming sirens, and the rotor blades of two federal tactical helicopters descending rapidly through the tree line.
