She dropped the gun. It hit the floor with a heavy thud, the silver plating reflecting the grime of the clinic. “What have I done?”
“You can fix it,” I said. “Call the feds. Give them the names. But first, you’re going to help me get into St. Agnes without Anton’s men seeing me coming. You’re going to be the distraction.”
The ride to the church was silent. Emily held Oliver in the back seat, whispering to him in a language of comfort I would never understand. I looked at her in the rearview mirror. She was a different woman than the one I had met twelve hours ago. The desperation was gone, replaced by a cold, sharpened focus. She was no longer the prey.
“Marcus,” she said. “David will be there. He’ll be waiting for Anton to finish the job.”
“I know.”
“Don’t kill him,” she said. I looked at her, surprised. She continued, “I want him to watch everything he built turn to ash first. Death is too quick for a man who took years of breath from my son.”
St. Agnes was a skeletal remains of a church on the edge of the city. It was where I grew up. My mother used to pray there, under the watchful eyes of saints whose paint was now peeling like sunburnt skin. It was poetic that Anton chose it for the final act. He always had a sense of the dramatic.
We pulled up to the gates. Anton’s men were everywhere, shadows moving among the gravestones. But I had called in my own favors. From the darkness of the surrounding tenements, the “Wolf’s Pack” began to emerge. Men I had saved from the streets, men I had paid when they had nothing, and men who owed me their lives.
“Nico,” I said into my radio. “Total sweep. Clear the perimeter. Leave Anton and David to me.”
CLIFFHANGER: We stepped into the nave of the church. The air was thick with the scent of old incense, damp stone, and gun oil. David Carter stood at the altar, looking like a king in a ruined kingdom, holding a glass of wine. But beside him wasn’t just Anton. It was the Police Commissioner, wearing a look of grim boredom.
CHAPTER 7: SANCTUARY IN FLAMES
The Commissioner looked at me with a bored expression, as if I were a minor annoyance in a long day of meetings. “Marcus. You’ve become a nuisance. David here has been very helpful to the department’s ‘discretionary fund.’ You’re disrupting a very delicate ecosystem.”
“Helpful with his pocketbook, maybe,” I said, my voice echoing off the vaulted ceiling. “But he’s been poisoning the city to do it. You’re protecting a man who tried to kill his own son for an insurance payout. Is that the new standard for the badge?”
David stepped forward, his face twisted in a sneer. The wealth was still there, but the rot was showing through. “You’re done, Vale. The girl, the kid, the records—they all vanish tonight. Who’s going to believe a fixer and a waitress over the Commissioner?”
“I recorded everything, David,” Emily’s voice rang out. She stepped from the shadows behind me, holding the cracked iPhone high. “From the moment you saw me at the club. The confession about the apartment, the insurance fraud, the names—it’s already uploaded to a secure cloud server.”
David’s smile faltered. His eyes darted to the phone. “That piece of junk? It’s broken.”
“The screen is broken, David. The memory is fine,” I added. “And Claire is currently at the federal building with the original files. She’s giving a statement as we speak.”
The Commissioner looked at David, then back at me. I saw the calculation in his eyes. He was a political animal, and he knew when the wind had shifted. He was deciding whether to kill us all and hope for the best, or cut his losses and run.
“Check your phone, Commissioner,” I said. “The news just broke on the digital editions. The Sutton Holdings scandal is the top story. Your name hasn’t been mentioned… yet. But if you stay here, you’re part of the crime scene.”
The Commissioner checked his phone. His face went grey. Without a word, he turned and walked out of the side vestry, leaving his men behind. He was a rat, and the ship was sinking.
“Wait!” David screamed, his voice cracking with desperation. “You can’t leave me here! We had a deal!”
I walked toward him. He tried to run, but Nico was there, blocking the exit with a cold, silent stare. David backed up against the altar, his hands trembling.
“You wanted to see what logistics earned you, David?” I said, grabbing him by the collar. I dragged him toward the stained-glass window that overlooked the city. “It earned you a life in a six-by-nine cell. You’re going to watch your son grow up from behind a glass partition.”
Suddenly, a shot rang out. A piece of the marble altar exploded near my head, spraying dust into the air. Anton stepped from behind a pillar, his gun smoking. He didn’t care about the scandal. He didn’t care about the names. He was a mercenary to the end.
“Nobody leaves until I get paid,” Anton growled. “The board wants the data, Marcus. Hand over the phone or the boy dies after all.”
He fired again, the bullet hitting Nico in the shoulder. Nico went down, his suppressed rifle clattering across the stones.
I dived for cover, pulling Emily and Oliver down behind a heavy oak pew. The church became a battlefield. Muzzle flashes lit up the stained glass like demonic lightning, casting red and blue shadows across the floor.
I saw Emily grab the fallen gun from Nico’s hand. She didn’t hesitate. She fired three shots toward Anton’s position, her face a mask of pure determination. She wasn’t a trained killer, but she had something Anton didn’t—a reason to fight that wasn’t money.
“Go!” she yelled at me, her voice commanding. “Get the boy out the back! I’ll cover you!”
CLIFFHANGER: I grabbed Oliver and headed for the side door, but the floor groaned beneath us. A massive wooden beam, weakened by years of rot and the impact of the bullets, began to collapse from the ceiling directly over Emily’s head.
CHAPTER 8: THE LAST THING SHE SOLD
I didn’t think. I lunged back, shoving Emily and Oliver out of the way just as the beam crashed down with the force of a falling mountain. It missed my head by inches, but the weight pinned my leg to the stone floor, the pain a white-hot scream in my brain.
“Marcus!” Emily cried out, trying to lift the timber.
“Get out! Take Oliver and run!” I roared, the sweat pouring down my face.
Anton emerged from the smoke, his footsteps slow and rhythmic. He leveled his gun at my head. “Finally,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion. “The Wolf is caught in a trap. I always told you, Marcus—empathy is a weight. It’s what finally brought you down.”
A single shot echoed through the hollow church.
Anton looked down at his chest, a look of pure confusion on his face as a red stain bloomed across his white shirt. He looked at me, then at the shadows behind him. He fell backward, hitting the stones with a heavy thud, dead before the echoes of the shot had faded.
Behind him stood Claire Whitmore. She was trembling, the silver gun held in both hands, the smoke still curling from the barrel. She had followed us. She had seen her father’s betrayal, and she had chosen a side.
“He was going to kill you,” she whispered, dropping the gun.
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