Chapter 9 - THE SIEGE OF SAINT JUDE
The bullet didn't hit Stellan.
It didn't hit me.
It struck Elder Sterling Vance directly in the center of his chest.
The eighty-year-old patriarch dropped his cane, stumbled backward, and collapsed onto the cobblestones with a dull, wet thud, his fedora rolling into the bloodstained gutter.
Screams tore through the courtyard. The remaining eleven elders scrambled like frightened sheep, diving behind parked vehicles and stone buttresses as high-caliber sniper rounds began raining down from the high-rise luxury towers across the street.
*Crack-thump. Crack-thump.*
"Sniper! North perimeter, thirty floors up!" Vance roared from the fire escape, opening fire with his rifle toward the glittering glass tower across LaSalle Street.
Stellan moved instantly, slamming his body into mine and driving us down behind the reinforced engine block of the Mercedes G-Wagon. He covered me and Fern entirely, his massive frame absorbing the impact of stone chips and ricocheting copper jackets as rounds tore into the pavement inches from our feet.
"Julian is dead!" I screamed over the deafening crack of suppressed sniper fire. "Who is shooting at us?!"
"Julian wasn't the head of the operation," Stellan growled, pulling a fresh smoke grenade from his harness. "Julian was the trigger. Someone else financed the strike team."
He yanked the pin with his teeth and hurled the canister into the center of the courtyard.
Thick, blinding white phosphorus smoke billowed across the cobblestones, masking our heat signatures from the thermal scopes above.
"Vance! Get the G-Wagon moving!" Stellan yelled into his comms. "We need extraction right now!"
"Tires are shredded, Boss!" Vance shouted back through static. "They shot out the radiator! We’re on foot!"
Through the dense white smoke, the sound of heavy diesel engines rumbled from LaSalle Street.
Two massive, unmarked armored personnel carriers smashed through the iron gates of the cathedral rectory, their heavy steel bumpers pulverizing the brick pillars into powder.
Men in sterile, gray tactical gear—not Julian's street mercenaries, but elite private military contractors with suppressed submachine guns and night-vision optics—poured out of the rear doors in textbook military formations.
They didn't advance on the surviving elders. They moved with terrifying, surgical focus straight toward the G-Wagon where we were pinned.
"Stellan," I gasped, holding Fern so tightly against my ribs that her small heart fluttered against my fingers. "They aren't syndicate men. Look at their patches."
Stellan leaned around the front bumper, his gray eyes narrowing as he spotted the emblem on the lead contractor’s shoulder: a black triangle enclosing a silver caduceus.
His face drained of blood.
"Vanguard Medical Technologies," he whispered, a horror dawning on him that I had never seen before. "It’s not a family dispute, Selene. It was never about the family trust."
"What are you talking about?"
"Fern's medical records," Stellan said, his voice shaking with a terrifying realization. "The genetic sequence Isaac found in the vault. It wasn't just the Torrence lineage. Arthur Torrence didn't just build a criminal syndicate before he died. He funded the Prometheus Protocol—a forty-year human genome project to synthesize a universal bone marrow match for late-stage leukemia."
My stomach plummeted into an icy abyss.
"Fern..."
"Fern isn't just an heir to money, Selene," Stellan said, his voice thick with agony. "Fern was born with the only viable, fully integrated cellular antigen sequence ever successfully developed by that project. Her bone marrow is worth more than every square foot of real estate in Chicago. To a dying billionaire, she’s not a child. She’s the cure to death itself."
The lead contractor brought up a tactical megaphone, his voice amplified, cold, synthetic, and completely devoid of emotion:
"Mr. Cross. Lay down your weapons. We have no interest in your life or the life of Evelyn Torrence. Surrender the infant. A medical transport team is waiting at Meigs Field. Comply within thirty seconds, or we utilize lethal force on all targets."
"They want to harvest her," I whispered, the words tasting like ash and bile in my mouth.
Tears burned my eyes, but beneath the tears, a primal, feral rage ignited in my chest.
No man, no syndicate, no pharmaceutical conglomerate was going to take my daughter.
"Stellan," I said, grabbing his tactical vest with both hands, pulling his face toward mine. "Do you have any more explosives?"
Stellan looked at me, stunned. "Selene—"
"Do you have explosives or not?!"
"Two fragmentation grenades and a remote thermite charge," he said.
"Give me the thermite," I ordered.
"Selene, what are you doing?"
"You said this cathedral was built over the old Blue Line subway tunnel," I said, pointing toward the heavy cast-iron sewer grate ten feet behind us in the courtyard pavement. "The tunnel is fifty feet down. If we blow that grate with thermite, we drop into the maintenance shaft."
"It's a forty-foot drop onto active third-rail tracks, Selene! It could kill us!"
"Staying here guarantees they carve her open in a lab!" I shouted, staring him down with all the fury of a mother fighting for her cub. "We jump, Stellan! We jump together!"
Stellan looked at me for one second, then reached into his pouch, pulled out the heavy rectangular thermite block, and slapped it directly onto the iron hinges of the sewer grate.
He set the timer for three seconds.
"Hold her tight," Stellan whispered.
He wrapped his massive arms around both me and Fern, his body forming a living suit of armor around us.
*CLICK.*
A blinding, white-hot flash of four-thousand-degree thermite burned through the iron hinges like butter. The heavy cast-iron grate gave way with a deafening screech, dropping into the black abyss below.
"Contractors advancing!" Vance screamed from the smoke.
"Jump!" Stellan roared.
We plunged into the pitch-black darkness.
The wind tore the breath from my lungs. Fern screamed into my neck. Stellan tightened his grip, shifting his entire body mid-air so that his back and legs were positioned beneath us.
*CRASH.*
We slammed into the roof of an empty, slow-moving northbound Blue Line subway train rumbling through the underground tunnel.
The metal roof buckled beneath Stellan’s back with a terrifying crunch. The breath exploded from his lungs in a ragged gasp of pain, but his arms never unlocked from around me and Fern.
We rolled across the corrugated steel roof as the train hurtled through the subterranean darkness at forty-five miles an hour, leaving the cathedral, the gunfire, and the mercenaries far behind in the dust and sparks of the Chicago underground.
Stellan lay flat on the roof, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, his ribs visibly cracked beneath his torn tactical vest.
"Stellan!" I gasped, crawling across his chest, checking his neck, his face. "Stellan, look at me!"
He opened his gray eyes slowly, coughing up a spatter of crimson, but when he looked at Fern, who was crying but completely unharmed, a faint, battered smile touched his lips.
"She... she still has all her toes?" he wheezed.
"Yes," I sobbed, laughing through my tears. "She’s fine. You saved her."
"Not yet," Stellan groaned, struggling to sit up against the rush of the tunnel wind as the train rounded a curve toward the abandoned Damen Avenue station.
He pulled a small, encrypted satellite phone from his waterproof vest pocket.
The screen was blinking with an incoming call from an unlisted international number.
Stellan hit speakerphone.
A voice came through—not Julian, not Natalia, not the mercenary commander.
It was an elderly, frail voice, breathing with the mechanical assistance of an oxygen concentrator, cultured and infinitely sinister:
"Adrian. You were always exceptionally resilient. Just like your father."
Stellan’s entire body went rigid. "Arthur?"
My heart stopped.
*Arthur Torrence?* My father?
"The yacht explosion was twenty-five years ago, Arthur," Stellan rasped into the phone, his voice shaking with disbelief. "I saw your dental records."
"Dental records are very easy to buy when you own the coroner's office, my boy," the old man wheezed through the speaker, a dry, rattling chuckle echoing from the receiver. "You brought my granddaughter right to me, Adrian. And more importantly... you brought me my cure."
The phone clicked dead.
And at that exact moment, the subway train screeched to a violent, emergency halt inside the dark, abandoned station.
May you like
The platform lights flickered on, revealing thirty men in Vanguard tactical gear waiting on the platform, their weapons aimed directly at our train car.
***
