Chapter 4 - The Silver Wing
The digital timer blinked a bright, bloody red as the countdown dropped to four minutes and fifty seconds.
Marcus backed toward the private elevator, maintaining eye contact with Ethan.
"You were like a father to me after my mother died," Ethan said, his voice breaking with years of suppressed grief.
Marcus simply shrugged, showing no remorse for destroying the boy he had sworn to protect.
"Business is business, Ethan," Marcus replied before the elevator doors slid shut, sealing him safely away.
The server room immediately began to heat up, the cooling fans whining in a desperate, failing pitch.
"We need to stop the overload," Claire yelled, running toward the central console.
She frantically typed commands into the keyboard, utilizing every trick she had learned in her IT background.
Ethan stood paralyzed for a moment, the weight of a lifetime of betrayals threatening to crush him completely.
He remembered the day his mother died, the day his real father had walked away, and now this.
"Ethan, I need your administrative password right now," Claire screamed over the roaring servers.
He snapped out of his trance, rushing to her side and typing in a long string of complex characters.
The screen flashed an error message, denying them access to the cooling protocols.
"He locked us out of the mainframe completely," Claire gasped, wiping a bead of sweat from her forehead.
Smoke began to pour from the ventilation shafts, choking the air in the sealed room.
Ethan grabbed a heavy fire extinguisher from the wall and smashed it against the reinforced glass of the exterior window.
The glass did not even crack, mocking their desperate attempts to escape.
"We are going to die in here," Claire whispered, coughing violently as the smoke grew thicker.
Ethan dropped the extinguisher, his broad shoulders slumping in sudden defeat.
He turned to look at her, the harsh red emergency lights catching the silver chain around his neck.
The chain had shifted during the chaos, pulling the small pendant out from under his shirt completely.
Claire stared at the tiny, handmade metal angel with its perfectly uneven wings.
May you like
Her breath caught in her throat, the heat of the burning room entirely forgotten.
"Where did you get that necklace?" she asked, her voice trembling with sheer disbelief.
