Frozen Vengeance: The Last Meal

Chapter 18

Chapter 18: First Blood

"Sir. Sir, wake up."

Rafi came awake to Domingo's hand on his shoulder and the distant, controlled crackle of gunfire beyond the garden wall.

"How many," Rafi demanded, already swinging his legs off the bed.

"Four confirmed, rear service gate. They cut the primary sensors, but the backup floodlights caught them cold." Domingo's radio crackled with clipped, overlapping updates Rafi couldn't fully parse. "Panic room. Now, sir. That's not a request."

"I want to know what's happening out there."

"You'll know everything in five minutes. Right now I need you alive to hear it." Domingo's voice left no room for argument, and for once Rafi didn't push back.

"Team two, report," Domingo barked into the radio, already moving Rafi toward the reinforced door.

"Contact at the service gate, four hostiles, exchanging fire. Floodlights active, they're pinned in the open."

"Casualties."

"None on our side. Confirmed hit on at least one hostile."

"Copy. Continue containment, do not pursue past the wall." Domingo shoved Rafi gently but firmly through the study door. "Lock it behind me. Don't open it for anyone but my voice specifically saying the word 'clear.'"

"And if it's not your voice."

"Then you shoot through the door and ask questions after," Domingo said, already turning away. "There's a reason I insisted on that panic room having its own weapon locker, sir. Use it if you have to."

The panic room's steel walls hummed faintly with the estate's backup generator, muffling the fight two floors above into something distant and unreal. Rafi sat in the dark, phantom pain lancing up his forearm the way it always did when fear reached back through the years toward a serrated knife he could still feel dragging through tendon in a life that technically hadn't happened yet.

The radio crackled again. "Two down on their side. One in custody. One fled over the east wall, we're not pursuing past the property line."

"Bring the one in custody to the study."

"Sir, protocol says we hold him in the secure room until—"

"Bring him to the study, Domingo. I want to look at him while the adrenaline's still working against him."

Ten minutes later, the man sat zip-tied in the same interrogation space they'd used three nights earlier, bleeding through a hastily field-dressed shoulder wound, glaring at Rafi with the same trained, professional silence as the man who'd died at the engagement party.

"You're not getting a capsule this time," Domingo said flatly, having already checked the man's mouth twice with gloved fingers.

The man said nothing.

Rafi set the broken brass token on the floor between them and watched something flicker across the man's face — not fear exactly, but recognition, sharp and immediate.

"You recognize this," Rafi said.

"Everyone in my line of work recognizes it eventually. Question is how long it takes to matter to them."

"Then you know what I'm going to ask."

"You're going to ask who sent us." The man's laugh was short and humorless. "You're going to ask what the Concord is, who broke it, and why your grandfather spent his last years terrified of exactly this conversation. Same questions, every time. You people are remarkably predictable once the shooting starts."

"Then answer them and save us both the theater."

"The Concord isn't broken because of you, Villaroman." His eyes stayed steady, almost pitying. "It's broken because someone made very sure it would be, twenty years ago. And the people who did that aren't the ones you should be worried about tonight."

"Then who should I be worried about."

The man's gaze flicked, deliberately, toward the study door — toward the direction of the village, of Dasmariñas, of everything Rafi had walked away from three weeks earlier.

"Someone closer than you think," he said. "Someone who's been feeding information to people like me for longer than you'd want to believe."

"Give me a name."

"Names get people like me killed faster than silence does," the man said. "You saw what happened to my colleague at the party. You think I'm eager to follow him."

"You're already going to prison for the rest of your life. What's left to protect."

"My family," the man said simply, and for the first time something almost human crossed his face. "You'd understand that, wouldn't you. A man who spent nine years paying for a family that wasn't even his."

The comment landed harder than Rafi expected, and he made himself breathe through it before answering. "That's exactly why I understand exactly how far people will go to protect the wrong things. Give me something useful, and I'll make sure whoever's threatening your family never gets the chance to follow through."

The man studied him for a long moment, calculating. "You can't protect anyone from these people. Not your banker, not your family, not yourself."

"Try me."

"Ask your ex-wife what she told Marco's family about a pendant her husband never took off, not even in bed. See how honest she is with you now, compared to nine years of practice lying to your face."

Rafi's hand curled into a fist at his side, nails biting his palm.

"Get him medical attention," he said quietly to Domingo, turning away before his expression could give anything more away. "I want him alive for the next conversation. And find out who was on watch when the east wall breach happened — I want to know exactly how four professionals got that close without anyone raising an alarm sooner."

"And this one," Domingo asked, holding up the brass token where it had rolled near the man's boot.

Rafi took it back, feeling the sheared edge bite into his palm the way it had at the engagement party.

"This one means we're not done tonight," he said. "Get Antonio here. Now. I don't care what time it is."

Domingo hesitated at the door. "Sir, before I make that call — how did four professionals get within thirty meters of your fence line without a single alert from the sensors we installed three days ago."

"I was hoping you'd tell me."

"I already checked. The primary sensor array was manually disabled from an internal terminal twelve minutes before the breach." Domingo's jaw tightened visibly. "Someone inside this house did that, sir. Someone with the access codes."

Rafi felt the floor shift slightly under a fact he wasn't ready to hear. "Who has those codes."

"You. Me. And the two technicians who installed the system." Domingo held his gaze. "I trust my own men. That leaves an uncomfortable question about the installers."

"Then find out everything about them tonight. Before Antonio even gets here."

"Already on it," Domingo said, and for the first time that night, something like real fear moved behind his professional calm. "Sir — I don't think whoever's behind this needed to break down your gate. I think they walked through the front door a week ago wearing a work badge, same as before."

"Then pull every badge issued in the last month. Every contractor, every delivery, every guest list from every gathering held on this property since the renovation started."

"That's a lot of names, sir."

"Then we start tonight," Rafi said, "and we don't stop until every one of them is accounted for."