Chapter 20 - The Crimson Wildflower
*CRACK!*
The high-caliber round tore through the shattered glass entryway.
Ethan moved purely on instinct, throwing his body across the floor, knocking Evelyn and Sophie beneath the protection of the heavy granite counter. Maria fired three blind rounds into the darkness above before diving behind the marble pillar, her face covered in brick dust.
The bullet struck the concrete floor where Sophie had stood a second before, leaving a crater the size of a fist.
"Sniper on the ridge!" Ethan roared, his tactical training overriding the emotional shockwave. "Get Sophie into the escape tunnel! Now!"
"Ethan, who is that?!" Maria shouted, crawling toward him through the debris, her hands bloody from shrapnel. "Marcus is dead! Who is shooting at us?!"
Evelyn wiped the blood from her forehead, her eyes wide with sudden, sickening realization. She gripped Ethan’s sleeve with frantic desperation.
"Marcus wasn't the head of Ouroboros," Evelyn gasped, her breath coming in ragged pants. "Marcus was just the broker. The real architect... the man who funded Vanessa, the man who owned the judge, the man who paid the mechanic..."
A voice echoed over the safehouse’s external emergency loudhailer—a smooth, cultured, terrifyingly familiar voice that made Ethan’s entire soul turn to ice.
A voice he had not heard in ten years.
A voice that belonged to a grave he had wept over in his youth.
*"Did you really think you could bury the past beneath a magnolia tree, little brother?"* the voice boomed through the coastal fog, accompanied by the thrumming roar of twin helicopter blades descending directly over the estate.
Ethan froze.
His eyes dilated in absolute, paralyzing horror.
*Brother?*
Thomas Hawthorne.
His older brother. The golden boy of the family empire, who had supposedly perished in an offshore yacht explosion in Monaco a decade ago—the tragedy that had forced Ethan to take the bloody mantle of the syndicate boss in the first place.
On the terrace above, a tall figure in a black trench coat stepped through the smoke, framed by the blinding spotlight of an attack helicopter hovering twenty feet above the cliffs.
In his gloved hand, the figure held a single, fresh red wildflower—identical to the one Sophie had picked beneath the magnolia tree on the day Ethan thought peace had finally arrived.
He tossed the red flower onto the bloody marble floor of the foyer.
*"You inherited my empire. You took my seat. You married the woman I wanted. And now, Ethan..."*
The lasers of three separate tactical sniper sights painted crimson dots across Ethan’s chest, Maria’s forehead, and Sophie’s trembling shoulders.
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The man in the spotlight smiled down at them, raising a gold-plated Desert Eagle.
*"It's time to return what’s mine."*
