Chapter 123: Right Conversation

Adrian moves through the entrance hall unhurriedly, his men fanning out behind him with the casual confidence of people who believe grief has left this house wide open.

I watch it all from the surveillance room, my stomach in knots, my father silent beside me with his jaw locked tight.

Then one of Adrian’s men stops near a hallway camera, tilting his head at it.

The camera turns.

On screen, Adrian goes still, and I watch understanding move across his face a half second before he looks straight up into the lens, straight at us, and smiles. He shakes his head slightly, almost admiring, and lifts a phone to his mouth, saying something we can’t hear.

“He knows,” I breathe.

Outside, headlights sweep across the gates as the funeral convoy returns, but it isn’t carrying grieving relatives in suits. A dozen black SUVs roll up the driveway, tearing across the manicured lawn to form a tight, armored circle around the mansion.

Our men pour out of the vehicles with their weapons raised, completely locking down every window, terrace, and exit point from the outside.

Moment later, a second fleet of unmarked gray sedans comes flying around the estate gates. They slam their brakes in the middle of the access road and begin unloading a line of armed operators into the tree line.

“Are those yours?” I ask, turning toward my father.

Dad shakes his head. “Son of a bitch must have had backup on standby down the block.”

Eli steps up beside my father. “What does that mean for us?”

“It means our men outside are about to have their hands full,” Marcus replies. “Which means inside, it’s just us against whoever Adrian brought through that door.”

My father holds his hand out and Marcus places a gun in it without a word. Dad racks the slide, checking the chamber with a practiced fluid grace.

I step into his path, placing a hand against his chest.

“Where are you going?” I ask, already knowing the answer and hating it anyway.

“To end this,” Dad responds, then looks past me to Marcus. “Tell the interior team to get ready to close in. But you tell every single one of them to leave Adrian for me.”

He turns toward the door, but pauses just before stepping out and turns back, his gaze settling directly on Eli.

“I can’t imagine how difficult the choice you made today was, Elias,” Dad says, his tone completely devoid of judgment. “You kept your end of the deal, so I’ll keep mine. But you don’t have to watch the next part if you don’t want to.”

Without waiting for a response, my father and Marcus step past the threshold. The door clicks shut behind them, leaving Eli and me alone in the dim glow of the monitors.

I turn to look at Eli, and the sight of him breaks my heart.

He is standing completely rigid, staring at the camera monitor where Adrian is currently moving with his men who are badly outnumbered now and clearly aware of it. I understand exactly what’s tearing through Eli right now, the specific horror of watching your own father walk toward something you helped set in motion.

I step forward and place a gentle hand over his locked fingers. “You know this was the only choice left.”

“Was it?”

“If you’d let this war go on, so many more people would have died,” I tell him softly, leaning in until he feels the warmth of my breath against his arm. “At least this way, you had a chance to negotiate for his life.”

“I betrayed him,” Eli says, his voice breaking slightly. “What kind of man does that make me, willing to betray my own blood? If anything happens to him, I don’t think I can ever–”

“Nothing is going to happen to Adrian tonight,” I say firmly, holding his gaze. “My father will keep his word. I promise you that.”

Eli looks back at the screen for one more second, then slowly pulls his hand back, and pulls out his gun from his waist holster.

I stare at him in disbelief. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Eli unhooks the safety catch on his gun. “Making sure.”

With that, he turns on his heel and steps out of the room before I can pull him back.

“Eli!” I yell into the empty hallway, but he is already gone.

I let out a furious curse, slamming my fist against the edge of the table as I watch two of the men I love most in this world walk straight into a war zone, and I have never in my life felt more useless standing in a room full of screens.

On the screen, the interior of our home becomes an absolute warzone.

Adrian’s men are trained, David’s men are trained, and the mansion takes the damage between them, glass shattering, wood splintering, gunfire echoing through hallways I’ve walked a thousand times without once imagining this.

I stay on comms, calling out positions, warning of sneak attacks, keeping everyone I can reach alive from a distance that feels agonizingly far.

Through the haze of smoke, I watch my father move through the room like a ghost from his past, firing with precise, brutal efficiency. But as he steps around a collapsed display cabinet, a round hits the wall right beside his ear. The impact knocks his earpiece out of his ear, sending the small receiver clattering into the carpet behind him.

“Dad! Dad, your comms are down!” I scream into the mic, but it’s useless. He can’t hear me.

Eli’s too far across the hall, pinned down himself, exchanging fire with two men near the staircase.

My eyes dart back to the main camera on my console screen.

Adrian is crouching behind a column near the edge of the dining hall. As my father exchanges fire with the men in front of him, his back is turned completely to the danger. Adrian slides out from behind the stone pillar and begins creeping closer.

“Someone get to David!” I yell into comms. “Marcus! Eli! He’s right behind him!”

“Fire is too heavy!” Marcus’s voice crackles back through my headset, full of static. “We’re pinned down!”

I watch the screen in absolute horror. Adrian is stepping closer while reloading his weapon to take the shot that will end my father’s life before anyone can reach him.

“Screw this,” I say to the empty room.

I connect the surveillance feed to my phone, grab it, and run for the sound room down the hall, my hands shaking as I patch every speaker in the house into a single feed and select the loudest track and hit maximum volume across all ground-floor zones.

The entire ground floor of the mansion explodes with deafening, room-shaking orchestral music.

That’s the distraction I needed.

The sudden roar of sound rips through the estate, disorienting everyone mid fight, and I use the half second of chaos to disconnect the main speakers, route the feed straight to my own headset instead, and scream into it.

“Behind you!” I roar into the mic at the absolute top of my lungs, the sound blasting through the speaker directly above my father’s head.

Dad spins on his heel, swinging his weapon around just as Adrian is raising his weapon, but my father is faster.

He aims instantly, his line of sight crystal clear. He has a clean kill shot right through Adrian’s chest.

But for a fraction of a second, Dad hesitates. The decades of history, the shared blood of their early years, and his promise to Eli, freezes his finger for a single beat, and instead of putting a bullet through Adrian’s heart, Dad shifts his grip an inch to the right and fires.

The bullet grazes Adrian’s shoulder.

“Aaargh!”

Adrian lets out a yell, his handgun clattering out of his grip and bouncing across the floor. Before Dad can close the distance, Adrian ducks under a large dining table, scrambles across the broken glass and slips out through the shattered patio doors that Dad’s team had used minutes earlier.

Dad finds an opening through the smoke and sprints after him into the dark side corridors.

Seconds later, Eli breaks through the side hallway, sees the open patio doors, and runs out into the darkness after both of them.

Up in the sound room, I stare franticly down at the tiny video feed on my smartphone.

“Come on, come on,” I whisper, my fingers tapping the screen to switch camera angles.

Suddenly, camera five goes black with a loud burst of static. Then camera six goes dark.

Adrian is shooting out the ceiling sensors as he retreats, blinding the surveillance cameras section by section.

“Dammit!” I yell, snatching my phone off the desk.

Blind now, I abandon the sound room and run for the control room, my heart hammering, desperate to find someone, anyone, who can tell me what’s happening.

As I turn the corner into the corridor, a hand closes around my arm before I can react, and a powerful blood-stained arm locks around my neck, dragging me backward into his chest. The next thing I feel is a cold steel gun barrel pressing violently against the side of my temple.

“Eli!” I scream, and footsteps pound down the hallway toward us almost instantly, Eli rounding the corner with his weapon already raised, his face draining of color at the sight of me.

My father arrives from the opposite direction seconds later and stops dead still at the sight of the gun pressed against my head.

Adrian looks between the two men, his lips twisting into a bloody, triumphant smile despite the blood soaking through his sleeve.

“Now,” Adrian says softly, his grip tightening against my throat, “we’re finally having the right conversation.”