Chapter 6 - The Blackout
Gabriel tackled Mia forcefully to the ground just as a second sniper bullet ripped through the apartment, tearing the leather sofa entirely to shreds.
Marco immediately dropped to his stomach, raising his rifle and firing blindly into the darkness of the city skyline to provide suppressive cover.
"They cut the main power grid to the entire block!" Marco shouted over the deafening roar of his own weapon.
Gabriel shielded Mia with his own body, his heavy, muscular frame pressing her safely into the cold concrete floor.
"Sterling must have tracked the IP address when we connected to his video call," Gabriel realized, cursing his own momentary lapse in judgment.
Mia squirmed slightly under his protective weight, her brilliant mind already calculating a desperate escape route.
"The building's backup generator is located in the basement, but it is connected to a smart-grid maintenance server," Mia whispered urgently into Gabriel's ear.
"If I can reach the breaker panel in the hallway, I can manually overload the exterior floodlights on the adjacent building and blind the sniper."
Gabriel looked down at her, completely amazed by her terrifyingly practical intelligence under extreme enemy fire.
He nodded once, a silent agreement forged in the crucible of absolute survival.
"On my mark," Gabriel commanded, drawing his secondary weapon.
Marco laid down another massive volley of cover fire, shattering the remaining glass in the window frames.
"Go!" Gabriel roared, pulling Mia to her feet and sprinting toward the heavy steel door of the apartment.
They burst into the dark hallway, immediately met by three heavily armed mercenaries wearing night-vision goggles.
Gabriel did not hesitate, moving with a lethal, fluid grace that was both beautiful and entirely terrifying to witness.
He neutralized all three men in less than five seconds using a combination of precise gunfire and brutal hand-to-hand combat.
Mia rushed to the electrical panel on the wall, using her father's lockpicking tools to rip the metal cover open.
She frantically rerouted the thick copper wires, ignoring the painful electrical shocks biting at her bruised fingers.
Suddenly, a massive surge of electricity flooded the adjacent building, igniting the industrial floodlights with blinding, daylight-level intensity.
The sniper across the street was instantly blinded, his laser sight vanishing entirely from the hallway walls.
Gabriel quickly retrieved Leo from the safe room, holding the quiet, sleeping baby protectively against his chest.
"We need to take the freight elevator down to the loading dock," Gabriel ordered, leading them swiftly down the corridor.
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As the rusty elevator doors slid open, Marco's radio crackled loudly with a distorted, heavily scrambled voice.
"You are never making it out of this lobby alive, Gabriel," the ominous voice mocked through the static.
