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Chapter 342: Home
It snowed in Manhattan on Christmas Eve, the first real snow of the winter, and by the time the sun went down, the whole city was white and quiet under the streetlights.Ethan stood at the tall windows of the new apartment on Central Park West, holding a glass of wine he'd forgotten to drink, and watched the flakes drift down past the glass. They had moved in three weeks ago. Chloe had refused to go back to the old penthouse, and he hadn't argued. Some places held too much, and you couldn't scrub it out no matter how hard you tried. The new place had big windows and warm wooden floors and a nursery that looked out over the park, and best of all, it had no history at all.Behind him, the apartment was full of noise.Henry Caldwell sat in the best armchair by the fire with his leg propped up on an ottoman and a cane leaning against the arm, holding court. The surgeons had taken eleven pieces of metal out of his thigh, and he had told the story of the shotgun to every nurse, doctor, and
Chapter 341: The Last Con
The Cross Financial helicopter lifted off the roof of the tower four minutes later, with Ethan, Chloe, Vance, and Volkov packed into the cabin and the pilot pushing the engine as hard as it would go.Nobody spoke. Chloe sat beside Ethan with her hand clamped around his and her eyes fixed on the window, watching the gray suburbs blur past below them, and he could feel her trembling through her fingers. Volkov was on his phone in Russian, calling every man he had within twenty miles of Greenwich. Vance sat across from them, loading a fresh magazine into his pistol with hands that never stopped moving.Twenty-two minutes. That was how long the pilot said it would take. Ethan counted every one.---Adrian Kessler had come out of the black water of the Upper Bay just after one in the morning, half-drowned and bleeding from a hole in his back, a hundred yards down the shore from Pier 41. He had crawled up a rotting boat ramp in Red Hook and stolen a car from a mechanic's lot, and he had dri
Chapter 340: The Vote
Natalia was waiting at the bottom of the elevator in the lobby of Vault Three when Ethan walked in at one in the morning, carrying her son.She didn't scream, and she didn't run. She just stood there with both hands pressed over her mouth, staring at the little boy in Ethan's arms as though he might disappear if she blinked. Then Noah lifted his head from Ethan's shoulder, saw her, and held out his arms."Mama," he said sleepily.Natalia made a sound Ethan would remember for the rest of his life. She crossed the lobby in four steps and took her son and folded herself around him, sinking to her knees on the marble floor with her face buried in his curls, sobbing so hard that her whole body shook. Noah patted her cheek with his small hand, confused, and offered her his dinosaur.Ethan stood back and let them have the moment. When he glanced over, he saw that even Vance had turned to face the wall.---The Cross Financial boardroom occupied the entire sixty-second floor of the tower on P
Chapter 339: The Exchange
They had eleven minutes to decide, and they used every one of them."It could be a trap," Vance said, pacing the war room. "She wants us to split our forces. Send half of us to Greenwich, and Ethan walks onto that pier with nobody covering him.""Or she's going after Alexander," Chloe said. Her face was white. "While we're all in Brooklyn.""Volkov's men are already at the estate," Marcus said. "Twelve of them. Plus Caldwell's own security.""Benson was Caldwell's own security," Chloe said flatly.Ethan looked at the map on Marcus's screen, at the little red dot crawling north along the Hutchinson River Parkway, and then at the clock. Eleven-twenty."Volkov," he said. "Take four men and go to Greenwich. If Victoria so much as touches the front gate, I want her in handcuffs. Fredrick, you're with me in Red Hook.""I'm going to Greenwich too," Chloe said.Ethan turned to her. "Chlo...""He's my son, Ethan." Her voice didn't shake. "You're going to go get Noah. I'm going to make sure nob
Chapter 338: Seraphina's Goodbye
They worked through the whole day without stopping.Seraphina sat beside Marcus at the main console on Floor 40 with her sweater sleeves pushed up to her elbows and her hair coming loose from its knot, typing so fast that her fingers blurred. She and Marcus fell back into a rhythm that neither of them had used in a year, finishing each other's sentences, arguing in shorthand that nobody else in the room understood, pointing at lines of code and snapping out words like handshake latency and core mirror and recursive seal. Twice, Marcus threw his pen across the room in frustration. Once, Seraphina laughed out loud at something on the screen, and the sound surprised everyone, including her.Chloe watched them from the other end of the table. She had expected to feel jealous, watching another woman sit in her husband's world and speak its language so fluently. Instead, mostly, she felt grateful, and a little bit in awe.By four in the afternoon, they had a working mirror."It's a snapshot
Chapter 337: The Ransom
By nine o'clock that night, the war room on Floor 40 of Vault Three was full.Marcus sat at the main console with three monitors glowing in front of him and an energy drink at his elbow. Vance leaned against the concrete wall with his arms folded. Volkov had taken a chair by the door, where he could see everyone who came in, and was cleaning a pistol on his knee with the calm of a man doing a crossword. Natalia sat in the corner with a blanket around her shoulders, her eyes red and swollen, clutching her phone as though it might ring with her son's voice at any moment.Chloe sat beside Ethan at the long steel table. She had refused to go back to Greenwich. Alexander was safe at the estate with her grandfather and a dozen of Volkov's men, and she had made it very clear, in the car on the way back from Green Haven, that she was done sitting in houses while other people decided what happened to her family."Walk me through it," Ethan said. "What exactly are the master keys?"Marcus spun
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