Chapter 8 - The Shadow of a Marriage
"Stand down, Jake!" Evelyn yelled, leveling her rifle directly at his chest through the door frame. "The building is surrounded by state police! You're not leaving here alive!"
Jake didn't even look at her. He made a subtle motion with his hand, and two heavily armed mercenaries stepped forward, suppressing Evelyn's position with a heavy hail of gunfire that forced her to dive behind a concrete pillar for cover.
Jake kicked the medical bay door open, stepping inside the room.
The smell of gunpowder and burnt copper filled the air.
He looked around the room, his eyes scanning the medical monitors, the discarded IV bags, and finally settling on me. I stood near the center of the room, holding the heavy iron IV pole like a spear.
"You always did look beautiful when you were angry, Sarah," he said softly, taking a slow step toward me. "It’s a shame, really. We had a good ten years. But people change. Markets shift. Opportunities present themselves."
"You tried to murder your own son, Jake," I said, my voice dropping into a register so low and dangerous it surprised even myself. "You looked him in the eye, placed your hand on his shoulder, and told him to rest while poison shut down his body."
Jake scoffed softly, shaking his head with genuine pity. "Ethan is young. He would have been a liability in South America. You both were. Do you have any idea what it feels like to spend every day pretending to care about suburban home improvements and soccer practice while managing forty million dollars in global transactions? I was suffocating, Sarah."
"You're a sociopath," I stated plainly.
"I am a pragmatist," he corrected, pulling a sleek, silenced pistol from inside his coat. "Now, give me the hardware token. I know Evelyn gave it back to you."
"I don't have it," I lied, keeping my body motionless.
"Don't play games with me!" he snapped, the rehearsed calm finally breaking as his eyes flared with psychotic rage. He raised the pistol, aiming it directly between my eyes. "Where is the drive?!"
"Looking for this?" a voice echoed from the hallway.
Jake spun around.
Agent Reed stood in the shattered doorway, blood dripping down her temple, holding the heavy metallic keychain up in her left hand. In her right hand, she held a remote detonator unit connected to the facility’s internal evidence-destruction system.
"If you shoot her," Evelyn said calmly, "I press this button. A high-frequency thermite charge inside our evidence safe will incinerate every digital sector on that drive in less than two seconds. You'll leave here with nothing."
May you like
Jake frozen. His eyes flicked between the gun in his hand, the drive in Evelyn’s grip, and the heavy concrete bathroom door where he knew Ethan was hiding.
The master calculator was trying to run the numbers. But for the first time in his life, every outcome pointed to total ruin.
