The Red Sight Over His Chest

Chapter 2 The Severed Strings

The maintenance tunnel opened onto a rocky breakwater. Atlantic water broke over the stones and soaked me to the knees before I managed to climb clear.

Behind me, fire rolled through the warehouse roof.

My hands were numb. It took three tries to pull the waterproof satellite phone from the lining of my coat. I had hidden it there six months ago, then spent every day pretending I would never need it.

The screen came on. I called the only number I knew by heart.

Lucian answered on the first ring. "Sienna?"

"It's time." My teeth knocked together as I read him the coordinates.

"Ten minutes."

He hung up without asking me to explain.

Eight minutes later, rotor blades beat over the water. A black helicopter dropped toward the breakwater, its searchlight passing over the waves before it caught me.

Lucian opened the side door and pulled me aboard. He wrapped a cashmere blanket around my shoulders. A woman in medical scrubs waited beside the equipment case.

"I brought an obstetrician," he said. "Just in case."

Months earlier, during a conversation that had sounded hypothetical, I told him my worst fear was being trapped while pregnant. Lucian had remembered one stray sentence. Dante had missed five years of them.

Lucian had brought the right doctor before he knew whether I was injured. He did not ask me to thank him or explain why I had waited so long to call.

The doctor took my wrist and began checking my pulse. I looked through the open door at the burning warehouse.

"I need your laptop."

Lucian passed me a military-grade encrypted device. I logged in through a route Dante's people had never known existed.

I left his balances untouched. They were evidence, and I had no intention of letting him call me a thief.

The system architecture on the screen was mine. I had designed its ledgers, authentication keys, and quiet routes between accounts while Dante took credit for an empire no bank could see.

I froze the liquidity behind his entire network. Billions remained visible on his screens, locked inside a vault whose key belonged to me.

Then I scrambled the communication keys used by his lieutenants across Europe and sent every intelligence feed to a dead server. His captains would still be able to call one another; none of them could prove who was on the other end.

Dante still had his money. By sunrise, he would learn how little that bought him without the systems I had built.

(Dante's POV)

At dawn, ash still drifted over the ruins. My shoulder throbbed under a clean bandage.

"Anything?" I asked.

Marco shook his head. "No body, Boss. The fire was too hot."

A searcher came over with an evidence bag held between both hands. Inside lay Sienna's platinum wedding ring, blackened and bent by the heat.

I knew that ring. I had put it on her finger in a locked room with only two witnesses.

"She's alive," I said.

Marco stared at the ruins. "Boss, nothing could have stayed in there."

"Sienna wouldn't stay. She wants me to believe she did."

This was punishment for choosing Chloe. Sienna expected guilt, then panic, then an offer rich enough to bring her home. She had always demanded proof that I needed her.

I called my bank manager.

"Freeze every personal account, credit line, and asset under Sienna Quinn. Effective immediately. Flag her passport, too. I want an alert the second she tries to leave the country."

Marco shifted beside me. "And if she doesn't use them?"

"She will."

Within a week, hunger and fear would end the tantrum. Sienna had spent five years under my protection. Whatever clever route she had used to escape, she would find her way back.

I put the evidence bag in my coat and left the search team to the ashes.