THE ATTACK
1155 Words
Draw 2
The city was bleeding snow.
Fat, wet flakes hurled themselves against the windshield of the armored Maybach as it ghosted up the private ramp to Blackwell Spire. Inside, Lily was laughing at something Ethan whispered, her Santa hat tipped sideways, hot chocolate smeared on her upper lip like a child. Mia was filming it on her phone, narrating in a mock British accent.
None of them saw the three black SUVs that peeled out of the service tunnel at sixty miles an hour.
None of them heard the suppressed cough of the first bullet that punched through the Maybach’s rear tire.
The second bullet took longer.
It spider-webbed the ballistic glass, held for half a heartbeat, then found the microscopic flaw Jason’s engineers had missed. It went through Lily’s left shoulder first, spinning her like a doll. The third round followed a quarter-second later, lower, just beneath the ribs on the same side, before the car’s armor finally decided it had done enough.
The Maybach fishtailed, slammed into a concrete pylon, and died.
Silence.
Then screaming.
Lily’s blood looked black under the sodium lights, spreading across the white hoodie in a blooming rose. She stared down at it, confused, like someone had spilled paint on her favorite shirt. Her mouth opened, closed. No sound came out.
Mia was clawing at the door handle, sobbing.
The back door was wrenched open from the outside.
Four men in matte-black tactical gear, faces hidden behind ballistic masks. No insignia. No words.
Professional.
One of them raised a pistol to finish the job.
Ethan threw himself over Lily and waited for the bullet that never came.
Instead, a single red dot appeared on the shooter’s forehead.
Then his head simply ceased to exist.
The rooftop sniper Jason had stationed on Spire Three (just in case) had finally earned his seven-figure salary.
The remaining three attackers scattered as every automatic weapon in a five-block radius woke up at once. The night turned into a storm of muzzle flashes and ricochets.
But it was already too late.
Lily’s eyes had rolled back.
Her lips were blue.
She was no longer breathing on her own.
Seventy-three floors up, Jason’s phone rang with a tone that had never been used before.
Code Obsidian.
The one he had prayed would stay buried forever.
He answered without speaking.
The head of his security detail’s voice was shaking.
“Contact front. Ramp level two. Lily’s hit. Twice. She’s… she’s down, sir. We have her. En route to Cornell Trauma. ETA four minutes if we run the lights. She’s… she’s not breathing on her own.”
Jason heard none of the rest.
The glass slipped from his fingers and shattered into a thousand priceless pieces.
The world went white.
Then black.
Then nothing.
He was moving before he knew he had decided to move.
The private elevator took seven seconds to reach the roof.
The AgustaWestland helicopter was already spooled up, blades slicing the blizzard into white shrapnel.
Jason vaulted in without a coat, without a word.
The pilot took off before the door was fully closed.
The flight was four minutes of hell.
Jason sat motionless, hands braced on his knees, staring at the blood on them that wasn’t there yet.
His mind ran casualty projections like a war computer.
Two gunshot wounds.
Left chest.
Possible lung involvement.
Possible cardiac tamponade.
Hypovolemic shock.
Golden hour ticking.
He had once watched a man bleed out in a boardroom in Dubai while Jason finished signing the papers that took his company.
He had felt nothing.
Now he felt everything.
Every heartbeat was a countdown.
Cornell Trauma Center, rooftop helipad.
They were waiting for him.
A trauma surgeon he recognized (Dr. Elena Park, best cardiothoracic in the Northeast, on his private payroll) met him at the door. Her face was the color of old ash.
“She’s in OR Two,” she said without greeting. “We have her on the table. Massive transfusion protocol is running. Left lung is collapsed. The second bullet clipped the splenic artery. We’re trying to clamp it but she coded once already in the ambulance. We got her back, but Jason… she’s fifteen. She’s small. She can’t take much more.”
Jason walked past her like she was smoke.
The observation window above OR Two looked down into a war zone of green scrubs and crimson.
Lily was almost lost under the drapes, tubes, wires, hands.
So small.
So terribly small.
Her chest was open.
A surgeon’s hand was inside it, literally holding her heart.
The heart monitor was a flat, endless scream that someone had muted.
Then it beeped once.
Again.
A rhythm.
Fragile. Furious. Fighting.
Jason’s knees buckled.
He caught himself on the glass, palms flat, forehead pressed to the cold window like he could will his own life through it and into her body.
He did not blink.
He did not breathe.
He simply watched the impossible, beautiful, unbearable sight of his little sister refusing to die.
Behind him, Mia has superficial wounds. Ethan refused treatment until we told him Lily was still alive. They’re all in private waiting, under guard.”
Jason heard none of it.
There was only the monitor.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Each one a miracle.
Each one a threat.
He stayed there for six hours.
They removed her spleen.
Repaired the lung.
Transfused fourteen units of blood (some of it his own, drawn on the rooftop while he watched through the glass like a ghost).
At 4:17 a.m., the surgeon looked up at the window, pulled down his mask, and gave a single, exhausted nod.
She was alive.
Jason slid down the glass until he was sitting on the floor, still in his blood-spattered Brioni shirt, tie long gone, knuckles shredded from punching a concrete wall he couldn’t even remember hitting.
Alive.
But not safe.
Someone had just shot his sister twice in the chest on the doorstep of the most secure building on the eastern seaboard.
Someone had declared war on the only thing Jason Blackwell had ever loved.
He pulled out his phone with hands that finally, visibly, trembled.
Typed a single message on a channel that had not been used since Prague.
Valkyrie is green.
Find them.
Bring me the one who ordered it.
Alive if possible.
Dead if necessary.
Preferably both.
He hit send.
Then he stood up, wiped the blood from his knuckles onto his trousers like it was nothing, and walked into the ICU where his fifteen-year-old sister lay drowning in tubes and wires.
Her hand was cold when he took it.
But it was there.
And Jason Blackwell made a promise against her skin, so low only the machines heard.
“I will find them, little star.
I will find every single one.
And I will teach them what happens when you touch what’s mine.”
Outside, the snow kept falling.
Inside, the devil began to hunt.
- Writer
