Chapter 33 - Fractured Allegiance
The concussive blast hurled Emma backward into the cold stone base of a marble plinth. Her ears rang with a high-pitched, piercing whine, white spots dancing across her retinas. Through the haze of smoke and blinding white light, automatic gunfire erupted—sharp, concussive bursts that tore through ancient plaster and shattered display cases of priceless antiquities into razor-sharp hail.
"Vincent!" Emma screamed, crawling through the debris, her hands slipping on powdered glass.
A heavy hand grabbed her shoulder, pulling her down behind an overturned oak display case. Vincent was breathing heavily, a streak of blood running from his hairline down across his left cheek. His eyes, however, were wide and blazing with a terrifying intensity she had never witnessed before.
"Stay low!" he roared over the gunfire. He returned fire with three disciplined, double-tap shots upward toward the mezzanine. A body crashed over the railing, tumbling twenty feet down onto the marble floor below with a sickening thud.
Dominic slid across the floor, clutching an MPX submachine gun, his shoulder stained with dark crimson. "They’re extracting through the north glass atrium! Helicopter incoming on the roof—I hear the rotors!"
"Leo!" Emma cried, looking toward the skylight above where the rhythmic, deafening thrum of rotor blades began to vibrate through the entire museum. "They took Leo!"
Vincent didn't answer with words. He sprang to his feet, discarding all tactical caution, and sprinted toward the grand staircase with feral fury. Emma and Dominic followed in his wake, climbing the blood-slicked stairs two at a time.
When they reached the upper gallery, the scene was devastation. Two security guards lay dead, their radios squawking static. The heavy steel door leading to the rooftop maintenance gantry hung wide open, twisted by thermite explosives. Cold Chicago night air poured into the gallery, carrying the smell of aviation fuel and burnt sulfur.
Bursting out onto the rooftop under the torrential rain, Emma saw the black, unmarked helicopter rising slowly into the misty night sky, its navigation lights dark. At the open side door stood Helena Moretti, her coat whipping wildly in the downdraft. In her arms was Leo, crying silently, staring down at the roof.
Vincent aimed his firearm, his arms shaking with rage. But there was no clean shot; the boy was held directly in the center of Helena's torso as a human shield.
"Shoot, Vincent!" Helena’s voice crackled through a megaphone mounted on the chopper's skid. "Prove to your peasant waitress that you care more about your pride than an innocent child! If you want your little heir back, Chicago will bleed first!"
With a roar of engines, the aircraft banked hard over Lake Michigan, melting into the dark, rain-soaked clouds and vanishing from sight.
Vincent slowly lowered his weapon. His hands were shaking so violently that the heavy steel gun slipped from his fingers, clattering against the wet gravel of the roof.
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Emma fell to her knees in the rain, burying her face in her hands. "Why... why would she take Leo? He has nothing to do with your family! He's just an innocent boy!"
Vincent turned to her slowly. In the pale glow of the storm, his face looked carved from granite, devoid of color or warmth. "Because she knows who you are, Emma. And she knows what my father hid inside your family's records before he died."
