The second Chloe's name flashed on my screen, a cold premonition settled in my gut. I knew something was wrong—I just didn't realize how wrong. I expected a domestic crisis, perhaps something with the boy, but the shocker she delivered nearly stopped my heart. Masked men were terrorizing the hospital. Marcus's life was hanging by a thread.
I didn't even wait for her to finish the sentence. I cut the call, the adrenaline already turning my blood to ice. I was still at the penthouse Chloe used at her own hospital, and Marcus's facility was only minutes away. Had I wasted a single heartbeat there, Marcus would have been dead meat by the time I arrived.
I tore through the streets, my tires screaming against the pavement, but nothing prepared me for the sight of the surgical wing.
The chemical smoke in the ICU wasn't black or billowing; it was a cold, tactical grey that tasted of sulfur and iron. It was designed to blind the cameras and choke the lungs, turning the high-end corridor into a slaughterhouse.
I stepped over the first body near the nurses' station. It was Kael. I'd personally recruited him three years ago—a man who could hear a pin drop in a thunderstorm—yet he lay there with a single, clean puncture wound at the base of his skull. No struggle. No warning.
"Boss, don't," Enzo whispered, his voice muffled by his tactical mask as his weapon swept the grey haze.
I ignored him. My heart was a drum of war against my ribs. In Room 412, my brother Marcus was tethered to a machine that was the only thing keeping his lungs moving. I didn't own this hospital, and I didn't have the keys to its systems, but I had turned this wing into a fortress the moment Marcus was wheeled out of surgery. Now, that fortress was leaking.
A sharp thud echoed from the end of the hall. Through the swirling mist, I saw the silhouette of a struggle. My third guard, Elias, was being dismantled. He was a brute of a man, built like a mountain, but his attacker moved with a fluid, sickening grace—not the heavy movements of a street thug, but the precision of a ghost.
I didn't shout. I raised my Beretta.
The bullet shattered the glass partition near them, the distraction giving Elias just enough room to drive an elbow into the intruder's ribs. I was on them in a second, my boot connecting with the attacker's chest, pinning him to the blood-slicked floor.
I pressed the hot barrel of my gun into the mask covering the intruder's face. "Who sent you?" I roared, the hospital's electronic alarms finally beginning to wail in a distorted, dying loop.
The man didn't scream. He just laughed—a wet, gurgling sound that made my skin crawl. "You're at the wrong door, Reed. You're guarding a grave."
I didn't need a name to know I was being played. My grip tightened on his throat until his windpipe groaned. "Give me a name, and I'll make it quick."
The man's eyes were wide and panicked behind his mask, but he remained silent. He wasn't a street thug; he was a professional. I didn't wait for a reply. I pulled the trigger, the muffled phut ending the sound of his laughter forever.
I stood up, the adrenaline coursing through my veins like ice water. I looked at the door to Marcus's room. The power was flickering, the machines inside chirping a frantic warning. I wasn't the administrator here; I had no idea where the generators were or how to fix the air filtration. I was just a man with a gun in a building that was failing.
"Enzo, get the medics!" I commanded, my voice dropping to a whisper that was deadlier than a scream. "If this floor loses power again, I want them bagging him manually. If he stops breathing, this whole wing follows him."
I turned toward the emergency exit, my mind already spinning with the implications of the breach. I'd promised safety, but the "Ghost" in the machines was already three steps ahead.
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