BOUND BY BLOOD AND BETRAYAL

Clara pressed her back against the brick wall of the furnace room, her hand instinctively shielding the carrier where Alexander slept.

""Sister?"" Clara said, keeping her voice even as she measured the distance between them.

The woman stepped into the flickering emergency light. She shared Lauren’s sharp, feline jawline, but her eyes were darker, colder, and her hair was cropped close like an operator's. A jagged combat scar traced across her collarbone.

""Vivian Blackwood,"" the woman introduced herself, a mocking smirk playing on her lips. ""Lauren was the bait to rot this family from the inside. I’m the cleanup crew. Our father was terribly disappointed that Lauren failed to secure the key before she broke her neck on the stairs. But he’ll be delighted to know I found both you and his grandson.""

""You're not touching my son,"" Clara said, her fingers tightening around her grip.

Vivian chuckled, a dry, grating sound. ""You're a sheltered society girl who spent her twenties playing house with an idiot like Julian Vance. You think because you're holding a gun you're a soldier? You just gave birth an hour ago, Clara. You can barely stand.""

""Try me,"" Clara whispered.

Vivian raised her rifle, but Clara didn't fire her weapon. Instead, she hit the red emergency purge valve on the industrial boiler directly beside her.

A torrent of superheated steam blasted from the fractured pipe, filling the narrow corridor with a blinding, roaring wall of white heat. Vivian screamed as the scorching vapor hit her exposed face and hands, her rifle discharging wildly into the ceiling.

Clara dropped low beneath the rising cloud of steam, lunged forward, and drove the butt of her submachine gun hard into Vivian's temple.

The mercenary crumpled to the floor, unconscious.

""Clara! Move now!"" Victoria screamed through the earpiece. ""Blackwood has entered the main foyer! He has fifteen heavy operators with him! They’re heading for the cellar stairs!""

Clara didn't look back. She sprinted through the swirling steam, bursting out into the service hallway. She leaped down the short flight of concrete steps back into the wine cellar and dove through the opening of the subterranean tunnel just as heavy boots thundered onto the marble floors above.

She sprinted along the tunnel, her lungs burning, her postpartum body screaming in agony. She reached the tungsten vault door and hit the interior rail access hatch.

The heavy steel sealed shut behind her, cutting off the sounds of the mansion above. Ahead lay a brightly lit circular tube where a sleek, bullet-shaped mag-rail pod rested on magnetic tracks, humming with immense kinetic power.

""Pod ready,"" Clara gasped into her mic. ""Starting ignition.""

“Access Denied,” a voice announced suddenly from the pod's console.