Chapter 8 - THE AMBUSH ON LEXINGTON
"Hold on!" Leo shouted, slamming the gearshift and cutting the steering wheel hard to the left.
The SUV spun across the wet asphalt, the reinforced bumper slamming into a steel utility pole with a shuddering crash that threw me forward against the front seat. Sophie woke with a terrified scream, clinging to my sweater.
"Stay down!" Vincent roared, drawing his weapon as the rear windshield of our SUV spider-webbed into a thousand opaque cracks under a hail of rifle fire.
The three sedans behind us stopped twenty yards away. Men in matching gray overcoats stepped out, weapons raised, methodically advancing toward our trapped vehicle. Marcus Vance emerged from the center car, holding an umbrella in one hand and a gold-plated automatic in the other.
"Vincent!" Marcus called out, his voice amplified through a squad megaphone. "Throw the child and the paper out the window, and I’ll let Elena walk away! You have ten seconds before we light this truck with incendiaries!"
"Leo, smoke screen," Vincent whispered, completely calm despite the impending massacre.
"Ready on your mark," Leo muttered, his hand hovering over an auxiliary panel on the dashboard.
Vincent looked at me. He took my face in both of his hands, his thumbs wiping away my tears. "Elena, when the smoke pops, Leo is taking you and Sophie into the subway entrance on the corner. You do not look back. You run until you reach the uptown platform."
"No!" I choked out, grabbing his wrists. "He'll kill you, Vincent! You can't fight all of them alone!"
"I owe Julian a life," he whispered, a sad, beautiful smile softening his hard features for the first time. "And I owe his daughter a future."
He turned to Sophie, pressing Julian’s small brass key into her tiny palm. "Keep this safe for Walter, sweetheart. Uncle Vincent is going to make sure the music never stops."
"Mark!" Vincent yelled.
Leo slammed the red toggle. Four high-output smoke canisters deployed from the wheel wells of the SUV, instantly blasting an impenetrable cloud of thick, white phosphorus smoke across the entire four-lane intersection.
Vincent kicked his door open into the blinding fog, his weapon firing rhythmically into the muzzle flashes of Marcus’s men.
"Run!" Leo yelled, grabbing my arm and hauling me out the passenger side into the blinding white cloud.
I held Sophie against my chest with everything I had, sprinting through the choking mist toward the green wrought-iron stairs of the 68th Street subway station. Behind us, the intersection erupted into an absolute warzone—the deafening roar of automatic weapons, shattering glass, and Marcus shouting orders into the fog.
As we reached the subway stairs, I looked back through a momentary rift in the smoke.
Vincent stood alone in the middle of Lexington Avenue, empty cartridges raining around his boots, firing with surgical precision, dropping three of Marcus’s mercenaries in seconds. But from the shadow of a stalled delivery truck, Marcus Vance stepped forward, leveling his weapon directly at Vincent’s exposed back.
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"Vincent!" I screamed into the rain.
A single shot cracked above the roar of the storm. Vincent’s body jolted, and he collapsed onto the wet pavement.
