Chapter 2 - The Syndicate's Ghost
"How did you get this?" Vance demanded, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. He scooped up the emerald, the familiar weight of the gem sending a phantom ache through his fingertips.
The woman looked up at him, her face pale, sweating profusely. "My... my father. Anton Volkov. He hid it before they killed him. I found it."
Vance’s mind raced. Anton Volkov’s daughter. Elena. He remembered her as a teenager, standing in the shadows of her father’s Moscow estate while Vance presented the finished jewel. Now, she was a desperate woman hunted by the same wolves that had torn her family apart.
"Silas," Vance said, the name tasting like ash in his mouth. "Silas has his men outside."
Elena nodded weakly. "Silas took over my father's syndicate. He needs the Eye. It’s not just a jewel, it's a ledger. The micro-engravings on the girdle... they contain the offshore routing numbers for the syndicate's black accounts. Over two billion dollars."
Vance grabbed a first-aid kit from beneath the counter, tearing open a gauze pad and pressing it hard against her side. Elena hissed in pain.
"They have a thermal cutter," Elena whispered, her eyes drifting toward the steel shutters. "They'll be through that door in less than three minutes."
As if on cue, a blinding shower of orange sparks erupted from the center of the steel barricade. The high-pitched whine of a plasma torch sliced through the silence. Silas’s men weren't going to wait.
"Can you walk?" Vance asked, hauling her to her feet.
"I have to," she gritted out.
"Good. Because we aren't going out the front." Vance led her toward the back of the store, past the humming beverage coolers. He shoved a heavy rack of soda crates aside, revealing a heavy, reinforced steel door meant for delivery drop-offs. But Vance hadn't used it for deliveries in a decade. He unlocked the deadbolt, revealing a pitch-black stairwell leading deep into the city's abandoned subway infrastructure.
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"Where does this go?" Elena asked, hesitating at the threshold.
"To the one place Silas’s men won't think to look," Vance said, pushing her inside just as the front shutters gave way with a metallic screech. "My grave."
