Chapter 5 - The Locked Doors
I sprinted toward the service hallway doors, completely ignoring the screaming guests behind me.
I pushed the heavy wooden doors open, but they were already locked securely from the outside.
A thick steel barricade slammed down over the broken ballroom windows with a loud mechanical grinding noise.
The heavy main doors of the ballroom slammed shut simultaneously, trapping everyone inside.
The elegant string music abruptly cut out, replaced by the blaring wail of a severe emergency alarm.
I pulled out my encrypted military phone to call in a tactical extraction team.
The digital screen was completely blank, indicating a massive signal jammer had just been activated inside the building.
Julian ran over to me, pulling a terrified Sarah by the hand.
Sarah wiped tears from her face, but her eyes were remarkably sharp and focused.
She looked at me and confessed that the sniper wasn't aiming for her at all.
She explained that she had purposefully fed false intel to her agency to make them think Julian was the mastermind behind the weapons smuggling.
She had tried to protect Julian from her own ruthless handlers, but her plan had horribly backfired.
The assassin wasn't hired by my father or my brother to stop the investigation.
The assassin was a rogue deep-cover operative sent by Sarah's own corrupt intelligence director.
Sarah realized with horror that her corrupted boss was actually inside the hotel tonight, directing the strike team.
I asked her how many rogue agents we were dealing with.
She told me there were at least thirty heavily armed mercenaries currently locking down the entire perimeter.
I looked around the panicked ballroom, realizing we were essentially fish in a barrel.
Suddenly, the massive television screens above the hotel bar flickered to life.
A live video feed showed a man sitting comfortably in the hotel's secure penthouse control room.
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It was Bennett Vale, the wealthy man my father had tried to force me to marry twenty-one years ago.
Bennett leaned back in a leather chair, smiled directly into the camera, and announced that the execution of the Voss family would now begin.
