184 When Manhattan’s Most Feared Crime Boss Found His Traumatized Daughter Asleep in My Waitress Apron, He Thought I Was a Stranger—Until He Discovered My Secret Past Was the Only Key to Saving His Missing Wife / Chapter 98 / 100

Chapter 98 - The Glass Partition

The silence in the silo snapped like a dry twig.

One of the armed men near the server racks raised a short-barreled shotgun. Marcus didn't hesitate. He fired three rapid rounds, the heavy bullets knocking the gunman over the railing, his body plunging twenty feet into the empty concrete pit below.

The second mercenary fired an automatic burst, the rounds tearing through the metal gangway, sparks showering into the darkness.

"Sarah, down!" Marcus barked, dropping to one knee as a bullet clipped his shoulder, spinning him violently against the railing.

I didn't cower. The adrenaline that had carried me from the diner through ten years of survival surged through my veins. I grabbed a heavy iron fire extinguisher mounted to the wall, swung it with all the force in my body, and slammed it into the side of the second gunman’s knee.

The joint snapped with a sickening pop. He screamed, collapsing onto the grating, and Marcus’s heavy boot drove into his chin, knocking him out cold.

Julian Vance backed away down the catwalk, frantically pulling a compact silver automatic from his waistband. His hands were shaking violently.

"You don't understand, Marcus!" Julian screamed, his back hitting the locked security door of bay three. "Evelyn made the deal with the syndicate council thirty years ago! Elena found the offshore accounts! She was going to hand the entire Vance family to the Justice Department! She was going to destroy everything our grandfather built!"

"She was trying to save our daughter from you," Marcus snarled, closing the distance between them with slow, terrifying steps, his gun never wavering.

"She's a ghost, Marcus!" Julian shrieked, aiming his gun at Marcus's head. "Look at the monitor! The purge sequence is at eighty percent! In two minutes, the cryo-mix freezes her lungs solid! You shoot me, you never get the manual seal code!"

"He doesn't need your code, Julian," I said, stepping onto the catwalk behind Marcus, holding up the blood-stained slip of paper from Donald Hayes. "He has Elena's."

Julian's eyes widened in horror. He lunged to fire at me.

Marcus pulled the trigger once.

The shot cracked through the concrete chamber. Julian gasped, clutching his chest, his gun falling through the grated floor. He slumped against the metal door of bay three, slid down the rivets, and lay motionless.

Marcus didn't look at his cousin's body. He threw his weight against the heavy security door, forcing it open, and stumbled down the spiral staircase into the pit toward tank three.

I ran down behind him.

The glass of the third chamber was thick with white frost. Marcus fell to his knees in front of the curved viewport, his trembling, blood-caked hands wiping frantically at the icy condensation.

Inside, suspended in a pale, amber nutrient solution, was a woman.

Her dark hair drifted weightlessly around her pale face. Her eyes were closed, an oxygen mask sealed over her nose and mouth, a slow, faint digital pulse beeping on the auxiliary monitor: *42 BPM*.

She looked identical to the photograph Marcus kept in the gold locket hidden inside his desk—the photograph Maya used to cry over before she went to sleep.

"Elena," Marcus choked out, pressing his forehead against the freezing glass, his shoulders heaving with uncontrollable sobs. "Elena, I'm here... I'm here, baby."

Above us, the automated voice of the mainframe droned through the speakers:

*“Warning. Auxiliary power diversion failure. Cryogenic purge in sixty seconds. 59... 58...”*

"The code, Sarah!" Marcus yelled, his voice cracking with desperation. "The code!"

I rushed to the pressurized console beside the tank. My hands were covered in soot and blood, but my fingers were steady. I punched the keys into the glowing keypad: *0 - 4 - 1 - 8*.

The screen flashed red: *INPUT SECONDARY BIOMETRIC OVERRIDE.*

"Biometric?" Marcus looked up, panic clawing at his face. "Donald said the biometric was at the diner!"

"No," I whispered, remembering Donald's dying words: *Thomas built the failsafe for you. You hold the switch.*

I pressed my right palm against the frost-covered glass scanner.

For two agonizing seconds, the scanner beam hummed red, analyzing the whorls and lines of my skin—the exact genetic match to the man who had designed the chamber thirty years ago.

A sharp electronic chime echoed through the silo.