Chapter 3 - Hidden Cargo
Dominic stared at the silent phone for three seconds before snapping it shut. He turned on his heel and bounded back up the stairs, moving with lethal speed. The fragile girl on the sofa was not just a courier; she was a walking detonator of secrets.
When he entered the penthouse, Dr. Evans was already kneeling beside the woman, cutting away the tattered sleeves of her sweater to expose a deep puncture wound near her shoulder. Evans, an elderly man whose silence Dominic had bought a decade ago, looked up with wide, troubled eyes.
"She hasn't just been beaten, Dominic," Evans said, holding up a pair of surgical tweezers. "There is a foreign object lodged beneath her collarbone. Surgically implanted. The incision is less than twenty-four hours old, stitched roughly with standard fishing line."
Dominic approached the sofa. The girl was shivering violently despite the wool blanket draped over her lower body. Her gaze drifted toward the ceiling, tears cutting pale rivers through the dust and grime on her cheeks.
"Elena," she muttered, her voice barely a thread of sound. "My name is Elena."
"Elena," Dominic said, crouching so his eyes were level with hers. "What did they put inside you?"
"A key," she choked out, her hands curling into tight, trembling fists against the cushions. "Dean tried to hide it from them. He said if they found the vault, half the city would burn by morning. But they caught him. They cut me open and shoved it inside... they told me if I didn't reach you in twenty minutes, the tracker inside the casing would ping every crew on the East Docks."
Dominic looked at Evans. The doctor’s hands were steady, but sweat beaded his wrinkled brow. "Can you remove it without killing her?" Dominic asked.
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Evans checked her thready pulse. "If I cut it out here without proper anesthesia and vascular clamps, the blood loss might take her before I finish. But if what she says is true, you don't have twenty minutes."
From the security console near the window, a sharp, repetitive red light began to flash, followed by the silent kill-feed of the perimeter cameras going dark one by one.
