Chapter 4 - The Midnight Gala
"Why tonight, Clara?" Maya demanded, her mind racing through tactical escape routes while the sound of boots echoed from the service corridor behind the reinforced metal door. *Thud! Thud!* Vance’s enforcers were slamming their shoulders against the steel. The iron mop handle began to bend with a sickening groan.
"Why bring Leo to Vance’s private estate tonight of all nights? Have you completely lost your mind?"
Clara shook her head violently, pulling Maya toward the rear delivery gate where a low brick archway opened toward the forested edge of the property. "I didn't have a choice! Yesterday morning, Vance's private attorneys filed an emergency petition for court-ordered paternity testing and temporary guardianship over Leo."
Maya froze in her tracks, a cold rage boiling her blood. "Guardianship? On what possible grounds?"
"They fabricated evidence that Daniel was involved in organized crime, claiming that Daniel stole fifty million dollars from Vance Shipping before his death," Clara said, her voice shaking with disgust. "The judge—Judge Thornton, who was appointed after Vance bankrolled his campaign—signed an ex-parte order. They were going to raid my house tomorrow morning. They were going to seize Leo legally. Once Vance had Leo in private custody, he would have extracted the DNA, decrypted Daniel’s vault, wiped the server, and..."
She couldn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to. A child who is the only key to a billionaire’s life imprisonment does not survive the weekend.
"So you came here to negotiate," Maya said, disbelief and anger lacing her tone.
"I came to tell him I destroyed the backup drives," Clara wept. "I came to offer him Daniel’s personal journals in exchange for letting us leave the country. I had two tickets to Zurich for three a.m. tonight. But when Leo wandered near the dessert display, Vance saw the St. Christopher medal around his neck. Vance recognized the engraving. He designed that seal himself for his senior partners."
*CRACK!*
The iron mop handle inside the metal door snapped in half. The heavy steel door burst open with a deafening crash, bouncing violently against the exterior brick wall.
Two private security contractors in tactical body armor and suppressed sidearms poured into the alley, their weapon lights cutting through the darkness in sharp, blinding beams.
"Targets spotted!" the lead operator shouted into his shoulder comm. "Rear alley! Non-lethal on the child, lethal authorized on the females!"
"Down!" Maya yelled, shoving Clara and Leo behind a commercial industrial dumpster as a suppressed round thwacked into the brick mortar an inch above her ear, spraying pulverized stone into her hair.
Maya didn't have a gun. She had an emerald silk evening gown, bare shoulders, and three years of pent-up fury.
As the second contractor rounded the corner of the dumpster with his weapon leveled, Maya exploded from the low shadows. She drove her heel directly into his kneecap with sickening force. The joint buckled backward with an audible snap. As the man screamed and collapsed, Maya seized his wrist, torqued his arm into an agonizing Kimura lock, and wrenched his Glock 19 free from his grip.
Before the lead contractor could adjust his aim, Maya rolled across the wet asphalt, brought the weapon up in a two-handed combat grip, and fired two precise rounds into the center mass of his ceramic body armor.
The kinetic force slammed the 220-pound mercenary backward onto his spine, knocking the wind completely out of his lungs.
Maya sprang to her feet, kicked the fallen weapon away from the groaning guard, and grabbed Clara’s arm. "Run!"
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They sprinted through the delivery archway, breaking into the dense pine woods that bordered the Blackwood Estate, while the estate’s secondary sirens began to howl into the midnight sky like wolves baying for blood.
***
