Chapter 3 - THE SHADOW OVER MONTAUK
Vincent didn't waste time with anger. In the underworld, anger was an expensive emotion, and right now, time was the only currency that mattered.
He reached into his jacket, pulled a three-inch ceramic blade from his belt, and drove it precisely into Daniel’s thigh. Daniel screamed, dropping to his knees as blood gushed over the hardwood floor.
"Marco, hold the front door for two minutes," Vincent ordered, stepping over the writhing lieutenant. "Dr. Harrison, grab your emergency bag. We take the underground tunnel to the subway line."
"Vincent, he can't be moved!" Harrison cried, gesturing to the monitor attached to Ethan.
"He dies if we stay!" Vincent roared. He unhooked the IV bag, looped it over his own shoulder, and scooped Ethan up into his arms once more.
The heavy oak front door of the safehouse blew inward with a deafening CONCUSSION BOOM. Flashbang grenades shattered the front windows, filling the parlor with blinding white light and choking smoke. Marco immediately opened fire, his heavy hand-cannon barking three times, dropping the first operator through the threshold.
"Go!" Marco yelled, pulling a pair of fragmentation grenades from his tactical vest. "I'll give you your two minutes, Boss!"
Vincent didn't look back. He carried Ethan down the cellar stairs, Harrison scrambling behind him with a medical kit slung over his shoulder. At the back of the coal cellar, behind a stack of rusted iron shelves, was an unmarked steel hatch leading into an abandoned 1920s pneumatic transit tunnel.
As Vincent slammed the steel door shut and threw the deadbolt, a terrifying explosion rocked the house above them. The ceiling dropped a cascade of mortar dust, and then... silence. Marco was gone.
They navigated the pitch-black tunnel using the flashlight on Harrison's phone. Ethan groaned, his head resting against Vincent’s neck. "Dad..."
"I'm here, son. I'm right here."
"The girl..." Ethan whimpered, his breath hitching. "Lucy... she's still in the cage... under the light..."
Vincent stopped in the middle of the damp tunnel. The water dripped from the brick archways above. "What girl, Ethan?"
"There are... twenty of us," Ethan whispered, his feverish eyes staring into the dark. "They didn't burn the bus, Dad. They took all of us. They told us... they told us our parents sold us."
A cold realization settled into Vincent’s chest, heavy as lead and sharp as glass. Twenty-three children had been on that Saint Jude’s Academy bus. The entire offspring of New York's wealthiest and most powerful elite—judges, politicians, cartel bosses, and tech moguls.
It had never been an accident. It had been a mass harvesting.
"Who took you, Ethan?" Vincent asked, his voice deathly quiet.
"The men in the white coats... they work for the man in the iron mask," Ethan gasped. "The facility... it’s under the old lighthouse at Montauk. They take our blood every week... they put it in black cases and send it to the ships..."
Harrison, standing behind Vincent, gasped. "My God... the Montauk Project rumors... the illegal biotechs... Vincent, if this is true, we aren't fighting a rival mob. We're fighting something backed by international shadow capital."
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Vincent turned his face toward the end of the tunnel, where a faint ladder led up to a storm drain on 8th Avenue.
"I don't care if they are backed by the United States Government," Vincent said, his eyes glowing with an unholy, absolute malice. "They took my blood. Now I tear their kingdom down to the dirt."
