Chapter 3 - The Breach
Moretti was arrogant, but he wasn't stupid. By the fourth day, the hospital's network had been breached. Moretti’s men knew Elena had survived. More worse, they knew Luca was on the fifth floor, meaning the secret was out.
At 3:15 AM, the lights on the fifth floor flickered, buzzed, and died.
The emergency backup generators failed to engage. The corridor was plunged into suffocating darkness, illuminated only by the eerie, pulsing red glow of the exit signs.
"Perimeter breach!" Marco Vitali’s voice crackled over the encrypted radio. "They disabled the service elevators. We have six heavily armed hostiles coming up the east stairwell. Boss, they are heading straight for the girl's room."
"Hold the corridor," Luca ordered, his voice a low, terrifying growl as he unholstered his weapon. "No one touches that door but me."
Luca moved through the dark hospital with the absolute silence of an apex predator. He reached Room 512. He slipped inside, his gun raised, ready to drag his unconscious daughter out of the bed and carry her to the extraction point himself.
But the bed was empty.
The IV lines had been carefully removed. The monitors were silenced.
"Close the door, Luca," a voice said from the shadows near the bathroom.
Luca froze.
Sitting in the wheelchair, cloaked in the darkness, was seventeen-year-old Elena. She wasn't trembling. She wasn't crying. She was holding a sleek, stolen hospital tablet in her lap, the screen casting a pale blue light across her face. And in that light, Luca saw it—the exact same cold, impenetrable, calculating stare that looked back at him every morning in the mirror.
"You know who I am," Luca stated, lowering his weapon a fraction of an inch.
"I've known who you were since I was twelve," Elena replied smoothly, her fingers flying across the digital keyboard. "My mother left a secure drive for me before the cancer took her last year. She warned me that Moretti would eventually stop looking for her and start looking for me."
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"Moretti's men are in the hallway," Luca said, stepping forward. "We have to move."
"We aren't going anywhere," Elena said, a dark, brilliant smile curving her lips. "I didn't survive a crushed spleen just to run away from a man who uses hired thugs to do his dirty work."
