Chapter 7 - The Master of Puppets
"Stay back!" I shouted, keeping the .38 trained on Marcus’s chest, my hand slick with sweat. "Elena told me everything! You swapped Chloe at the academy! You’re running Victor’s extraction!"
Marcus didn't raise his shotgun. He simply let out a low, humorless laugh that sent shivers down my spine.
"Your wife is the most brilliant sociopath I have ever encountered in twenty years of private intelligence," Marcus said, keeping his eyes sweeping the hallway behind him. "Tell me, Julian... if I kidnapped Chloe, why did I pull her out of a safe house in Boca Raton three hours ago?"
He reached into his pocket and tossed a tactical satellite phone onto the bed next to Elena.
"Hit line one," Marcus commanded.
My eyes darted between Marcus and the phone. I reached down, keeping my gun fixed on him, and pressed the speaker button.
A small, terrified, but unmistakably familiar voice echoed into the dark room:
*"Daddy? Daddy, is that you?!"*
My heart practically tore out of my chest. "Chloe?! Baby, where are you?!"
*"I’m with Uncle Marcus’s friends... they gave me hot chocolate... Daddy, there were bad men at the school, but Uncle Marcus carried me through the woods... Daddy, I'm scared, when are you coming?"*
"Soon, baby. Daddy is coming very soon," I choked out, tears finally breaking past my eyelids. "Stay with them. Do everything they say."
I cut the call, my hand trembling violently. I looked at Marcus. Then, slowly, with an agonizing sense of horror that made my entire world crumble, I turned my gaze toward the woman lying on the bed.
Elena wasn't crying anymore.
She was sitting upright, ignoring the searing pain of her fractured ribs. Her face was completely devoid of emotion, bathed in the pale moonlight.
In her right hand, pulled from beneath the mattress, was a small, polymer-framed Glock 43.
The barrel was pointed directly at my forehead.
"You always were too sentimental, Julian," Elena said softly. Her voice had lost all its warmth, all its cadence of love. It was ice. Pure, predatory ice. "A brilliant capitalist, but an absolute coward when it comes to the people you love. That’s why Victor always hated you. You took his empire with lawyers and balance sheets, while he built it with blood."
"Elena..." The word caught in my throat like ash. "You... you've been working with him since the beginning?"
"Not working *for* him, Julian," Marcus interrupted, his weapon still lowered, though his body was coiled like a spring. "Working *with* him. Mrs. Vance wasn't Victor Sterling’s victim. She was his primary silent partner before you ever met her. The hostile takeover you orchestrated three years ago? She fed you the insider data that allowed you to crush Victor’s legitimate side so they could liquidate four billion dollars in untraceable offshore bonds."
"And the car crash?" I whispered, staring at the woman I had built my life around for nearly a decade. "The broken ribs?"
"A mistake," Elena sneered, the gun not wavering an inch from my face. "Victor’s enforcers got greedy. They thought I was keeping the bearer bonds for myself. When they tried to hijack my car, Marcus intervened like the loyal, stupid attack dog he is. I had to improvise at the gala. I knew Marcus had seen the pen. I knew he was tracking my movements. So I used the oldest trick in the world—I played the battered wife. Because I knew you, Julian. I knew that the moment you thought another man had hurt me, your ego and your rage would blind you to everything else."
"You framed the man who saved your life," I said, a wave of profound disgust washing over the agony in my chest.
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"I protected our endgame," Elena retorted. "And now, the assault team outside isn't Victor’s. They’re mine. Victor is dead, Julian. I had him eliminated in the back of that Yukon forty minutes after the crash. His syndicate belongs to me now. All I need are the digital transfer keys stored in your biometric safe downstairs. Sign them over, and I let you walk away to raise Chloe in poverty. Refuse... and I leave both your bodies in this room and tell the police that Marcus Cole went rogue and slaughtered my family."
***
