Chapter 8 - A Dangerous Reunion in the Car
The passenger door of my compact sedan swung open, and before I could even protest, Dante slid his tall, imposing frame into the passenger seat, instantly making the small cabin feel claustrophobic and charged with tension.
He didn't say a word at first.
Instead, his dark, piercing eyes swept over my battered face, lingering on the swollen purple bruise around my left eye and the rigid foam collar supporting my neck.
"You look like you went twelve rounds with a heavyweight champion," Dante said quietly, his voice carrying an unusual undertone of raw, restrained emotion.
"The heavyweight champion didn't look much better when I stopped hitting back," I replied dryly, offering a tight, pained smile.
Dante let out a low breath, reaching across the console with surprising gentleness to adjust the angle of my seatbelt so it didn't press directly against my fractured ribs.
"Stubborn beyond all reason," he murmured, his fingers brushing briefly against my jacket sleeve. "What possessed you to check yourself out of a secure medical facility?"
"The same thing that possessed you to tear through Chicago at two in the morning when you got my emergency call," I answered, looking directly into his eyes. "Loyalty, business, and an absolute refusal to let someone else dictate the terms of my life."
Dante stared at me for a long moment, the hard lines of his face softening just enough to reveal the profound depth of the bond we had forged over three years of corporate warfare.
"Marcus," Dante spoke into his lapel comm-link, "bring the secondary security detail to the Michigan Avenue location. Miss Vance is riding with me."
"Copy that, boss," Marcus’s voice crackled back. "We're two minutes behind your position."
Dante turned his attention back to me, pulling a sleek, military-grade tablet from his overcoat and placing it on the center console.
"If Victor Vance is using our legacy encryption keys, he’s routing his final asset transfers through a ghost server hidden beneath the old postal sorting facility on Michigan," Dante explained, pulling up a digital floor plan of the building. "Our intelligence shows he has four armed guards stationed at the primary elevators."
"Then we don't take the elevators," I said, leaning in closer despite the protest of my ribs, my administrative instincts instantly taking over. "When I designed the server architecture for that building, I included a maintenance utility shaft behind the electrical room that bypasses the security grid entirely."
Dante looked at the digital blueprint, then looked back at me with a spark of genuine respect in his dark eyes.
"You planned an escape hatch into a building we didn't even own yet?"
"In my line of work, Mr. Moretti, you always leave yourself a back door," I replied with a faint smirk. "Shall we go crash our former CFO's retirement party?"
May you like
Dante’s mouth curved into a cold, lethal smile.
"Let'p go."
