Chapter 12 - Whispers in the Timber
The call disconnected with a hollow, digital click that sounded precisely like a firing pin striking an empty chamber.
I did not hesitate for a fraction of a second. Slipping the phone into my denim pocket, I walked with deliberate, measured calm toward the barn, masking the roaring panic tearing through my chest. Matteo was inside, stripping down the engine of our tractor with grease-stained hands, his weathered face showing the first signs of genuine peace he had known in over a decade.
I stepped into the cool, shadowed interior of the barn and laid my suppressed handgun flat on the wooden workbench between us. Matteo looked up, his dark, sharp eyes immediately reading the grim tension in my posture. When I spoke the name Marco Moretti, the wrench slipped from his calloused fingers and clattered loudly against the concrete floor.
Matteo didn't call me crazy. Instead, a sickening, haunted expression washed over his scarred features. He quietly confessed that during his years living as an underground phantom, he had intercepted coded transmissions from the High Commission signed with our father's personal seal. He had desperately convinced himself it was merely a traditional cipher used by the syndicate council, terrified to acknowledge the horrifying possibility that our old man had faked his death to ascend to the national throne.
Before I could demand why he had hidden that suspicion from me, the sharp crack of high-powered rifle fire shattered the quiet mountain air.
The heavy wooden beam inches above my head exploded in a shower of splintered pine. Through the open barn doors, I saw Beatrice throw her body entirely over Lily in the dirt, the dirt kicking up violently around them from suppressed sniper fire.
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Rage, pure and blinding, detonated in my veins. Matteo lunged forward, kicking open the secret weapon compartment built beneath the tool chest, racking the slide of an assault rifle in one seamless motion. I sprinted low across the open yard under a hail of incoming fire, scooping Lily into my left arm while firing my heavy pistol with my right toward the flash of sunlight reflecting off a rifle scope in the high timber.
Beatrice grabbed my belt, keeping low as bullets chewed up the porch steps around us. We barricaded ourselves inside the heavy timber walls of the farmhouse just as the first wave of black-clad tactical operators breached the perimeter fences. Our sanctuary was dead. The war had followed us home.
