VANGUARD OF THE BAY

CHAPTER 7: The Confrontation

"You touch one hair on his head, Sienna, and you'll never get what you're looking for!" I growled into the phone, my jaw clenched so hard my teeth hurt.

On the live feed, Sienna adjusted her coat, phone at her ear, standing over Captain Thomas. Her dark hair caught the streetlight, and her ice-blue eyes seemed to look straight into the camera lens across the alley, like she knew exactly which pixel I was watching through.

"You aren't in a position to make demands, Leo." Her voice was smooth, without an ounce of warmth. "Four minutes and thirty seconds. Don't test my patience."

The line went dead.

"Damn it." I slammed my hand on the console, the sting of it barely registering against everything else.

I looked around the vault. I couldn't stand by and let Thomas die for me, not after everything he'd already done to keep me breathing. I ran to the tactical racks along the wall and pulled out a lightweight Kevlar vest, strapping it tight over my bruised ribs with fingers that wouldn't quite stop shaking, and covering it with a dark hooded jacket I found on a hook nearby.

From a case on the counter I grabbed a compact signal jammer and three flash-bang capsules, slipping them into my pockets along with my father's compass, the brass cold against my palm even through the fabric.

I stepped onto the central elevator platform, slid the keycard into the control slot, and hit the fast-ascent button. The platform shot upward through the rock shaft and back into the old lighthouse above, the pressure change popping in my ears.

I slipped out through the stone door, keeping low past the security fence. Rain poured over the city, turning the muddy roads of the lower harbor into brown streams that dragged loose trash and debris along with them.

I sprinted through the alleys, heart pounding, every step burning my sore muscles worse than the last. The image of Thomas held at gunpoint kept my feet moving even when my body wanted nothing more than to stop.

Within three minutes I reached the alley behind his shop, lungs raw, breath tearing at my throat.

The two SUVs idled near the entrance, exhaust curling into the cold rain. Four guards stood with rifles raised, and Sienna stood near the shop door checking a tablet, unhurried, like she had all the time in the world despite the countdown she'd just given me. A crowd of neighbors had gathered at the mouth of the alley, kept back by a fifth guard, their faces lit orange by the streetlamp, watching with the particular helpless stillness of people who'd learned a long time ago that getting involved only got you hurt too.

Captain Thomas and Hank knelt on the wet cobblestones, hands zip-tied. A guard held a container of gasoline over the shop's wooden door frame, tilting it just enough that a thin trickle had already begun to run down the wood.

"Hold your fire!" I stepped out of the shadows, hands raised.

All four guards snapped their weapons toward me, red lasers converging on my chest in a tight cluster of dots. One of the neighbors at the mouth of the alley gasped, and a hand went up over a child's eyes before anyone could pull the kid fully out of sight.

"Stand down," Sienna ordered, raising a hand. The guards held their fire, but kept their rifles trained on me, the lasers not moving an inch.

She walked toward me with slow, precise steps, her eyes scanning my bruised face, wet hair, and the way I refused to flinch, cataloguing me like a line item.

"You're late by thirty seconds, Leo." She stopped five feet away. "Where's the vault card?"

"Let Thomas and Hank go first." My hand rested inside my jacket, on the signal jammer, my thumb finding the activation switch without needing to look. "They have nothing to do with my father's legacy or my uncle's war."

"Everyone in this city has something to do with your uncle's war, Leo," she said, almost gentle about it, like she was breaking bad news rather than making a threat. "That's the part you haven't figured out yet."

"You don't dictate the terms of your surrender." She stepped closer. "Marcus wants the card back, and he wants you out of Aethelgard Bay permanently. Give me the card and these men live."

"He's lying to you, Sienna!" Thomas shouted from the ground, his voice cracking with effort. "Marcus doesn't care about the law! He's using the Iron Syndicate to destroy this city!"

"Silence the old man," Sienna said flatly, not even looking back.

A guard raised his rifle butt toward Thomas, and for a moment nobody in that alley breathed. Even the rain seemed to hold itself back, the whole street narrowing down to that single raised arm and the old man kneeling beneath it.

"Look at this first!" I pulled out a digital drive I'd grabbed from the vault desk and held it up, my hand steady even though nothing else about me was. "This has the financial logs showing Marcus paying off the Iron Syndicate through offshore accounts. It proves he's behind the harbor attacks, in his own encrypted handwriting."

Sienna's cold expression flickered, just for a second, with something like real surprise, gone almost before I caught it. She looked at the drive, then at me, and then, for just a heartbeat, past me at the guard still holding his rifle over Captain Thomas's head, like she was recalculating something far larger than just my next move.

"Where did you get that?"

"My father documented everything before Marcus murdered him." I stepped closer, close enough now to see the fine tremor in her own hands that she was working hard to hide. "Take me to Marcus, and this data leaks to every network in the country automatically. There's no version of tonight where you walk away with it and nothing happens."

It wasn't entirely true. The drive was real, but the fail-safe I was describing existed only in the two seconds it had taken me to invent it. I kept my face as still as I could manage and hoped six months of hiding what I felt from Marcus's guards had taught me something useful.

She pulled a small tactical stun pistol from her coat and aimed it at my chest, the motion fast and practiced, the kind of draw that came from years of drilling rather than instinct alone.

Behind her, the guards shifted their weight, waiting for a word from her that hadn't come yet. Captain Thomas went still on the cobblestones, and even Hank stopped struggling against his zip ties, like the whole alley had narrowed down to just the two of us and the six feet of wet stone between us.

"You shouldn't have come back, Leo." Her finger tightened on the trigger.