Chapter 8 - The Bridge Confrontation
"Get down on the floor and cover your ears!" Ethan yelled to his brothers, pressing his hands over Oliver's head.
Outside the Mercedes, the trailing security vehicle's doors swung open, and three armed contractors advanced on Elena, weapons raised.
"Drop to your knees! Drop the weapon!" one shouted over the howling wind.
Marcus appeared from the driver’s side of the Ford, raising a high-powered strobe-dazzler unit. The pulsating, million-lumen beam of disorienting light struck the guards squarely in the eyes, instantly blinding them and disrupting their balance. As they stumbled, disoriented and clutching their eyes, Marcus fired three rapid beanbag rounds into their torsos, dropping them heavily onto the wet asphalt.
Elena reached the Mercedes. She didn't hesitate. She slammed the pneumatic glass-breaker against the rear passenger window. The reinforced bullet-resistant glass spiderwebbed into a thousand opaque fractures. She swung the tool again with all the force in her body, punching through the weakened structural layer.
The contractor in the front passenger seat twisted around, raising his handgun toward the shattered rear window.
Elena didn't fire a weapon. Instead, she popped the pin on a military-grade stun grenade and dropped it through the hole into the front footwell.
"Close your eyes!" Ethan screamed, burying his face into the floor mat.
A deafening BANG and an blinding white flash detonated inside the isolated front cabin. The polycarbonate partition shielded the boys in the back, but the two armed men in front collapsed forward against the dashboard, completely incapacitated by the concussive shockwave.
Elena reached through the shattered glass, unlatched the heavy door lock, and yanked the door open into the storm.
"Boys!" she cried out, her voice breaking through the sound of rain and sirens.
"Mom!" Lucas shrieked, scrambling out from under the seats and throwing himself into her arms.
Elena caught him, burying her face into his hair, before reaching in and pulling Oliver out by his waist. Ethan crawled out behind them, his face covered in soot and tears, but his eyes blazing with fierce pride.
"Mom, you came," Oliver sobbed, clinging to her neck like a lifeline. "You got the note!"
"I got it, my brave boy. I got it," Elena wept, kissing their faces, holding all three boys against her chest in a desperate, ferocious embrace.
"Elena!" a voice roared through the rain.
Elena looked up. Twenty yards away, Julian Vance had crawled out of the mangled wreckage of his lead SUV. His tailored suit was torn at the shoulder, blood dripping from a cut along his temple. In his right hand, he held a black semiautomatic pistol, pointing it directly at Elena’s chest.
"Step away from my sons," Julian snarled, his voice trembling with an unhinged, aristocratic fury. "They are Vances! You will not take what belongs to me!"
Marcus stepped between Elena and the gun, raising his rifle. "Drop the weapon, Julian! It’s over!"
"It will never be over!" Julian screamed, cocking the hammer. "I built this empire! I bought the courts! I own everything in this city!"
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Ethan suddenly broke away from Elena's grasp. The eight-year-old stepped forward, positioning his small body directly in front of Marcus's rifle and his mother's heart, looking his billionaire father dead in the eye.
"Shoot then, Dad," Ethan said, his young voice cutting through the howl of the storm with terrifying clarity. "If you want to kill Mom, you have to shoot me first."
