Within These Walls

Chapter Eleven: The Bird’s Final Flight

Dante Richard Hawke

The sound of the gunshot was a physical slap in the enclosed space of the cabin. My ears rang, the high-pitched whine of the jet's dying turbines sounding like a scream from another world.

Marcus Thorne looked down at his chest, his eyes wide with a confused, childish surprise. The snub-nosed revolver slipped from his fingers, thudding into the cream carpet. He didn't fall immediately; he swayed, the light in his eyes flickering like a candle in a draft.

"You... you actually did it," he wheezed, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth.

"For my mother," I said, my voice steady, though my heart was a caged animal thrashing against my ribs. "And for every life you burned to build this palace."

I stepped forward, not looking at him as he finally collapsed. I reached into the hidden floor safe he had been trying to open. My fingers closed around a heavy, leather-bound book and a high-capacity encrypted drive. The physical ledger. The real one.

"Dante! Get out of there!" Nova’s voice screamed through the comms, breaking through the static of my shock. "The hitmen are in the hangar! They’re not waiting for Thorne—they’re blowing the fuel lines!"

I looked out the thick acrylic window of the jet. The hangar was a hellscape of white chemical foam and flashing red emergency lights. Three black SUVs had breached the doors, and men in tactical gear were pouring out, their rifles leveled not at me, but at the control booth where Nova was perched.

"Nova, get down!" I roared, shoving the ledger into my tactical vest and sprinting for the cabin door.

Nova Starling Quinn

I didn't have time to process the fact that Dante had just finished our twenty-year nightmare. The first rifle round punched through the control booth's metal siding, missing my hip by an inch.

"s**t!" I hissed, sliding off the chair and onto the floor, my tablet clutched to my chest.

They weren't just here to kill us. They were here to sanitize the site. I could see them through the gap in the floorboards—six men, moving in a professional diamond formation toward my ladder. They carried suppressed submachine guns and incendiary grenades.

"Dante, I'm pinned!" I shouted into the mic, my fingers flying over the tablet screen. "I’m triggering the overhead crane. I need you to move toward the service exit behind the fuel tanks!"

"I'm coming for you, Nova!"

"No! If you come here, we both die! Get the ledger out! That's the only way this ends!"

I didn't wait for him to argue. I overrode the safety protocols on the hangar’s heavy-duty industrial crane. The massive steel hook I’d used to swing at the sniper was still dangling. I engaged the motor at maximum velocity.

Whirrr-CLACK.

The crane arm swung with a violent, mechanical groan. It didn't just hit the rafters; it tore through the support beams of the catwalk leading to my booth. The structure groaned and tilted.

The first hitman reached the top of the ladder, his masked face appearing over the edge of the floor. I didn't hesitate. I grabbed the heavy fire extinguisher from the wall and slammed it into his helmet. He grunted, his grip failing as he tumbled twenty feet back down onto the concrete.

"One down," I breathed, my heart hammering against my teeth.

But the other five were already spreading out. One of them pulled a thermite charge from his vest. They weren't going to climb up; they were going to melt the pillars and bring the whole booth down with me inside.

I looked at the monitor one last time. Dante was out of the jet, a shadow moving through the foam, heading toward the SUVs instead of away from them.

"Dante, what are you doing?" I screamed.

"Changing the plan," his voice came back, dark and dangerous. "They want a fire? I’ll give them a goddamn sun."

I watched on the thermal feed as Dante reached the lead SUV. He didn't use his gun. He pulled a flare from his vest and kicked over a high-pressure canister of aviation fuel he’d dragged from the jet’s shadow.

"Nova, jump!" he yelled.

I didn't ask questions. I threw my tablet into my bag, kicked out the remaining glass of the window, and leaped into the white haze of the fire-suppressant foam forty feet below.

The air rushed past me, a cold, violent whistle that drowned out the world for a heartbeat. Falling from the control booth felt like the fire all over again—that terrifying loss of gravity before the heat takes over. I hit the thick layer of fire-suppressant foam with a muffled thud, the chemical suds swallowing me whole. It tasted like bitter soap and copper.

"Rass! My back," I hissed, scrambling to my feet, wiping the white sludge from my ocean-blue eyes. My tactical vest had taken the brunt of the impact, but my spine felt like it had been compressed by a sledgehammer.

I looked up through the haze. The Bird hitmen were confused, their infrared sights struggling with the temperature shifts from the foam and the jet's cooling turbines.

"Dante! Get your big ass over here now!" I screamed into the comms, my Jamaican accent thickening under the stress. "The fuel lines are hissng like a pit of snakes, and these bumbaclots are moving in on your six!"

Dante Richard Hawke

I didn't need the warning. I could feel the vibrations of their boots hitting the concrete. I stood by the lead SUV, the flare in my hand burning a bright, defiant red. The heat from the leaking aviation fuel was shimmering in the air between me and the hitmen.

"Hawke! Drop the flare and hand over the ledger!" the lead man shouted, his voice muffled by a gas mask. "You’ve got nowhere to go!"

"I’ve spent twenty years with nowhere to go, you bloodsucking coward!" I roared back.

I looked toward the service exit where Nova was supposed to be. I saw a flash of black tactical gear and those blonde highlights moving toward the shadows. She was safe. For now.

I looked at the flare. Then at the pooling fuel.

"Tell your boss the Hawke family sends their regards," I growled.

I dropped the flare.

The world didn't just explode; it vanished. A wall of orange fire erupted, fueled by the high-pressure canisters and the SUV’s gas tank. The shockwave hit me like a physical punch to the throat, throwing me backward into the white foam. The sound was a roar that seemed to tear the very sky apart.

I rolled, the heat singeing the hair on my arms, and scrambled toward the darkness where I’d seen Nova.

"Move! Move! Move!" I grabbed her arm as soon as I broke through the smoke, pulling her toward the sea-side docks.

"Slow down, you oversized oaf!" Nova panted, stumbling as we sprinted past the burning wreckage of the hangar. "You almost turned us into jerk chicken back there! What the f**k were you thinking?"

"I was thinking that if Thorne's records are going to survive, his cleanup crew needs to be too busy screaming to chase us," I snapped, not letting go of her wrist.

Behind us, the hangar was a funeral pyre. The Gulfstream was a skeleton of glowing metal, and the screams of the hitmen were drowned out by the secondary explosions of the oxygen tanks.

We reached the edge of the pier, the dark Atlantic water lapping against the concrete. I pulled the heavy, leather-bound ledger from my vest and showed it to her. It was charred at the edges, but the pages were intact.

"We got it," I breathed, my chest heaving.

Nova looked at the book, then up at me. Her face was smeared with soot and foam, a cut on her cheek bleeding slowly, but her eyes were brighter than the fire we’d just left behind.

"Yeah," she whispered, a grim, beautiful smile touching her lips. "We got it. But the whole city is going to be crawling with Bird men and PD by sunrise. We’re officially the most wanted people in Florida, Dante."

"Then let's give them a hell of a chase," I said.

I didn't wait for her to argue. I looked at the sleek, black go-fast boat Thorne kept docked for emergencies. I jumped in, reaching back a hand to haul her down.

"You know how to drive this thing?" she asked, eyeing the twin engines.

"I’m a Miami cop, Nova. I was born on the water," I rumbled, turning the key.

The engines roared to life, a deep, powerful thrum that promised speed. We peeled away from the dock just as the first sirens began to wail in the distance.