The Billionaire's Revenge Bride

Chapter Eight

The first explosion didn't come from the penthouse. It rose from forty floors below a dull, bone-jarring vibration that rattled the crystal decanters on Lucian's bar. Then came the gunfire. Suppressed, professional, rapid.

"Get down!"

Lucian's hand slammed onto my shoulder before I could process what was happening, forcing me toward the reinforced concrete floor of the medical suite. I hit it hard, my palms scraping against the cold surface.

He didn't look like a CEO anymore. The polished mask had evaporated right before my eyes, replaced by something cold and lethal, the man who had once led the Hells Angels through the bloodiest nights of the Malibu turf wars. He pulled a compact submachine gun from a hidden compartment beneath the exam table, his movements a blur of practiced muscle memory that terrified me more than the gunfire below.

"Vivian, take the doctor and get into the panic room. Now!"

"What about Lily?" Vivian cried. I could hear the terror in her voice mirroring my own.

"She stays with me." His gaze never left the security monitors flickering to life on the wall. "They're already past the lobby. They're using jammers on the elevators, but they're coming up the service stairs."

I huddled on the floor, both hands instinctively shielding my stomach. The weight of the secret I carried two tiny pulses of life from two different worlds felt like a target painted on my skin. Tobias was dead, but his ghost had just sent an army to collect his assets.

"Lucian," I whispered, my voice barely holding together. "Who are they?"

"The Syndicate." His jaw was tight as stone. "The offshore backers Tobias was laundering for. They don't want the money, Lily. They want the Prescott heir. A child with that much hidden wealth and a clean name is the perfect puppet for a criminal organization to re-brand themselves in twenty years."

He looked at me then, his gray eyes darkening in a way that turned my blood to ice.

"And they'll kill anyone standing in their way. Including your daughter. Including the baby that's mine."

On the monitors, I watched a team of six men in tactical gear breach the executive floor. They moved with military precision. These weren't street thugs. These were high-level mercenaries.

"We can't stay here." Lucian grabbed a tactical vest from the wall and draped it over my shoulders. It was heavy, crushingly, so but it felt like a shield. "The panic room is a cage if they have thermite. We're going to the roof."

"The roof?" My voice climbed. "The helicopter is gone!"

A dark, reckless smirk crossed his face. "I don't need a helicopter. I have a bike."

We moved through the darkened hallways of the penthouse, the only light coming from red emergency strobes that painted everything in blood. The air was thick with ozone and the distant screams of the buildings security team. Every sound made me flinch.

Lucian led me toward the hidden workshop. He slammed his palm against the scanner, and the door hissed open. The BMW S 1000 RR sat there, shimmering beneath the emergency lights like a dark god of chrome and steel.

"You're going to ride that down the side of a skyscraper?" I heard the hysteria rising in my own voice and couldn't stop it.

"No." He grabbed two matte-black helmets. "We're going to ride it across the sky."

He hit a button on the wall. The entire glass facade of the workshop began to slide open, and the wind roared in like something alive and angry, a thousand feet of empty space dropping away into the dark Pacific below. A narrow, reinforced steel maintenance ramp extended from the ledge, connecting to the neighboring construction crane of the Knight Annex.

"Lucian, no." My hand pressed harder against my stomach. "I'm pregnant. I can't..."

"You're a fighter, Lily." He pulled the helmet over my head himself and clicked the strap with firm, deliberate hands. Then he gripped my face, his eyes burning into mine with an intensity that left no room for argument. "You defended a killer. You survived Tobias. You're going to survive this. Get on. Tight."

I climbed onto the back of the bike. My arms wrapped around his waist, and I was struck by how solid he felt like iron, like something immovable. He kicked the engine to life, and the roar of the BMW drowned out every other sound in the world.

Then I heard it. The mercenaries, breaching the workshop door behind us.

"Stop them!" a voice barked from the hallway. Gunfire sparked against the walls.

Lucian didn't look back. He twisted the throttle, the rear tire screaming against the floorboards, and launched us onto the narrow steel ramp.

I screamed. I couldn't help it. My eyes slammed shut as we soared into the abyss, the wind trying to tear me from the bike with violent, greedy hands. I buried my face against the leather of Lucian's jacket and held on for my life for all three of our lives. The bike hit the steel of the construction crane with a jarring, teeth-rattling thud, the suspension shrieking, but Lucian kept us upright. He always kept us upright.

We skidded onto the gravel of the lower roof. He cut the lights immediately. Behind us, Knight Tower was a pillar of smoke and strobes against the night sky.

He didn't stop. He navigated us down a service ramp into the dark streets of the industrial district. Only when we were five miles away, swallowed by the shadows of an underpass, did he finally kill the engine.

I climbed off the bike. My legs gave out completely, and I collapsed onto the concrete, my knees hitting the ground hard. I ripped the helmet off and gasped for air, my lungs burning.

"They're dead," I whispered. The words felt like stones in my mouth. "Everyone in the tower. Vivian. The doctor."

"Vivian is in the panic room." His voice lacked the conviction I needed from him. "It's built to withstand a nuclear blast."

He sat on the bike for a long moment, his head bowed, the adrenaline leaving him the same way it was leaving me slowly, painfully. Then he walked over to where I knelt on the ground, lowered himself to the concrete beside me, and placed his scarred palm over my stomach.

"Two heartbeats," he murmured. "One is my miracle. The other is my curse."

"Lucian..."

"I won't let them have him, Lily." His voice dropped to a register so quiet it frightened me more than the gunfire had. "But I won't let him take your life, either. If the Syndicate is coming for the Prescott heir, we give them what they want."

I went still. "What do you mean?"

"We fake the loss," he said. "A medical complication during the siege. We tell the world and the Syndicate that the Prescott twin didn't survive. We bury the heir so the boy can live."

My legal mind started spinning before I could stop it. Even here, on my knees in the dirt under an overpass, I was already working the angles. "And the money? The billions Tobias left?"

"Let the State have it." His voice was flat, final. "I have billions. I don't need his blood money to raise my family."

He stood, turning back toward the skyline, what remained of it. "But there's a problem. Tobias will had a third party involved. A witness who knows about the twins. Someone he trusted to ensure the 'right' child got the money."

Something cold settled in my chest. "Who?"

He looked at me, and I watched the chilling realization move across his face like a shadow.

"Your stepsister, Nora. She wasn't just his mistress, Lily. She was his backup. And she's currently in a transport van being moved to a high-security ward."

Before I could respond, I heard the buzz of a phone from his jacket pocket. He pulled it out. Stared at the screen.

It wasn't the siege that broke him. It was that small, glowing rectangle of glass.

I watched his face change completely.

He turned the screen toward me. No words in the message just a photo. The transport van, flipped on the highway, burning. And standing in the foreground, holding a bloody knife and a black motorcycle helmet, was a woman who looked exactly like the portrait in Lucian's locket.

The deceased fiancée. Evelyn.

"She's alive," I heard myself whisper. My voice failed on the last word.

Lucian dropped the phone. It clattered against the concrete. His face had become a mask of pure horror, emptied of everything even him.

"No," he said. "It's impossible. I *buried* her."

"Then who is that?" I pointed at the screen with a hand that wouldn't stop shaking.

The woman in the photo was looking directly into the camera. And on her neck was a tattoo that stopped my heart completely, the scales of justice. The same tattoo I had on my own shoulder.

But hers were dripping in blood.