Chapter 9 - Concrete and Cordite
"Down!" Julian roared, grabbing his mother by the collar of her silk blouse and hauling her bodily out of her chair just as the first suppressed rounds hissed through the air.
Phut! Phut! Phut!
The wooden table splintered into jagged kindling, chunks of oak exploding like shrapnel across the room. Thomas Briggs let out a shrill, undignified shriek as a 9mm round tore through his ostrich-skin briefcase, showering the linoleum in shredded legal contracts before another round caught him squarely in the shoulder, spinning him into the corner.
Julian slammed Victoria down beneath the heavy steel frame of the interrogation desk, shielding her with his body. His ribs screamed in agony from the previous beating, but adrenaline surged through his bloodstream, sharp and cold.
"Stay down!" he ordered.
The first shooter stepped across the threshold, gun held in a low-ready position, sweeping the room with surgical, practiced precision. These weren't street thugs; they moved with the lethal fluidity of tier-one contractors. Apex’s clean-up crew.
Julian didn't have a weapon. He had a twenty-pound steel institutional chair.
As the shooter’s boots cleared the doorframe, Julian surged upward from the floor, swinging the chair in a wide, vicious arc. The heavy tubular legs caught the gunman flush across the helmeted jaw, snapping his head sideways with a sickening crack. The man stumbled, his weapon discharging wildly into the ceiling, sending plaster rain down upon them.
Julian didn't hesitate. He drove his shoulder into the stumbling operator, pinning him against the concrete wall, his right hand locking around the barrel of the suppressed tactical pistol, twisting it upward and breaking the man's index finger in the trigger guard.
The gun dropped. Julian caught it in mid-air.
He brought the heavy steel slide down across the gunman’s temple, dropping him like a sack of wet concrete.
The second shooter appeared in the doorway, raising his rifle.
Julian fired twice through the opening. The suppressed reports were like heavy coughs in the enclosed space. The second contractor collapsed backward into the corridor, his weapon clattering harmlessly against the baseboards.
Silence crashed back into the precinct basement, thick with the chemical stench of burned powder and copper.
Julian stood panting, his knuckles bloody, the warm weapon steady in his two-handed grip. He looked down at his mother. Victoria was curled in a fetal position beneath the desk, her manicured hands clutching her knees, trembling uncontrollably, her arrogant veneer permanently shattered.
"Get up," Julian said, his voice colder than the grave.
"Julian... please..." she wept, looking up at him as if seeing a stranger.
"Get up, Victoria," Julian commanded, racking the slide of the stolen pistol. "You're going to fix this. You're going to give me the codes to Marcus’s private facility before he realizes his hit team failed. Because if you don't, I will leave you in this room when the next team arrives."
Victoria scrambled to her feet, leaning heavily against the blood-splattered wall. Her teeth were chattering violently. "The docks," she whispered. "Pier Forty-Two. He has a private terminal where the offshore servers are housed. That's where he’s running the liquidation."
Julian grabbed Briggs by his good arm, hauling the bleeding attorney to his feet. "Can you walk?"
Briggs nodded weakly, clutching his bleeding shoulder with a white handkerchief. "Yes... yes, God, Julian, please don't leave me."
"Call the state police from your private line," Julian ordered, shoving him toward the back exit. "Tell them Marcus Sterling has committed treason and attempted murder. And tell them if they don't lock down the harbor in twenty minutes, there won't be anything left of the family empire to salvage."
Julian turned to leave, but his phone in his coat pocket buzzed with a priority video alert from the hospital nursery.
He flipped the screen open.
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The live feed from the NICU showed the nursery floor completely empty. Incubator Four—his daughter’s incubator—was smashed open. The life-support monitors were dangling loose by their wires.
And pinned to the transparent plastic lid with a disposable scalpel was a handwritten note: The bloodline ends tonight, nephew.
