Chapter 100 - The Fall of the Workshop
Marcus recovered in a fraction of a second. Rolling across the timber floor, he fired three rapid rounds into the chest of the lead operative. The ceramic plates absorbed the impacts, but the force staggered the intruder backward through the shattered frame. Henri engaged the second man, grappling in the confined space between two towering antique grandfather clocks that swayed precariously under the impact.
"The side passage!" Clara yelled, coughing through the acrid chemical smoke. She kicked open a concealed wooden door hidden behind a rack of pendulum weights. "The water conduits under the Limmat! Move!"
Arthur Vance was on his knees, clutching his chest, his ebony cane rolling across the floorboards. "Katherine... the binder... don't leave the binder!" he wheezed, his eyes wide with a pathetic, desperate terror that I had never seen in him. The imperious patriarch was gone; in his place was a fragile, terrified old man who had gambled his life against titans and lost.
I looked at him for a single, frozen second. Ten years of hatred, ten years of exile, ten years of rebuilding my life and protecting my daughter boiled down to this fractured room smelling of ozone and cordite.
I grabbed the leather binder from the safe with one hand, and with the other, I seized Arthur by the lapels of his expensive coat, hauling him to his feet.
"You don't get to die here, Arthur," I hissed into his ear over the deafening cracks of gunfire. "You’re going to live long enough to watch your empire turn to dust."
"Mom, look out!" Maya screamed.
A third tactical operative materialized through the smoke, his rifle leveled directly at Maya's chest. Before he could squeeze the trigger, Henri threw himself into the man's flank, tackling him into the grand display case of eighteenth-century pocket watches. The heavy walnut cabinet collapsed with a thunderous roar of splintering wood and cascading brass, pinning both men beneath the wreckage.
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"Go! Go!" Marcus shouted, laying down a suppressing volley toward the front entrance where red laser designators were already sweeping through the haze.
We tumbled through the narrow doorway into the darkness of the subterranean shaft just as a second flashbang erupted behind us, blowing the heavy wooden door off its hinges and sealing the workshop in flames.
