Chapter 22 - The Fortress Breached
"Lock down the building!" Marcus roared into his encrypted radio, lunging toward the wall-mounted security console. "Code Black! Scramble the tactical detail to the roof, immediately!"
"Belay that order," I commanded, my voice slicing through the panic.
Marcus turned, his eyes wide. "Evelyn, are you out of your mind? If that is the man from the trust, he possesses legal standing under international maritime and banking statutes that could freeze our operational accounts within minutes! If he reaches the penthouse where the nanny has the kids—"
"He isn't going to the penthouse," I said, my pulse hammering a frantic war rhythm against my ribs as I watched the monstrous aircraft touch down on the rooftop pad. "He didn't come to steal them in the dark like a kidnapper. Men like that don't steal. They claim. He came directly to my office because he expects me to kneel like Eleanor did."
I pulled open the top drawer of my desk. Inside lay a snub-nosed .38 revolver—the one I had purchased the night Julian threatened to ruin me in the rain—and a sealed digital tablet containing the root kill-switch codes for the entire North American banking infrastructure of Vance Holdings.
"Call Captain Miller," I ordered Marcus, my fingers wrapping firmly around the tablet. "Have twelve armed operatives stationed outside these double doors. No one enters unless I give the word. But if Alexander Vance wants an audience with the mother of his children, he will face me alone."
Before Marcus could protest, the private elevator chime echoed through the vestibule. It was the executive lift—the one keyed exclusively to my biometric profile. The security override had been executed from an external satellite network in less than four seconds.
The pneumatic doors hissed open.
The private guards who had traveled up with the lift lay disarmed and unconscious on the polished granite floor of the elevator bank, their weapons dismantled and laid neatly beside their boots.
Stepping over them was a man whose presence sucked the oxygen straight out of the room.
He stood six feet four inches tall, dressed in a bespoke charcoal-grey three-piece suit cut from heavy English wool. His hair was midnight-black, brushed back from high, aristocratic cheekbones, lightly dusted with silver at the temples. But it was his eyes that struck me like a physical blow.
They were the exact, piercing, storm-grey color of Leo’s eyes.
The jawline, the slight arch of the left brow, the deliberate, predatory calm—it was like looking at a version of my five-year-old son cast in hardened iron and thirty-eight years of merciless European aristocracy.
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"You look exhausted, Evelyn," Alexander Vance said. His voice was deep, velvet-textured, with an accent honed in the boarding schools of Le Rosey and the boardrooms of Zurich. "Defeating two idiots like Julian and Eleanor should not have cost you so much color in your cheeks."
***
