Chapter 4 - The Sound of Falling Glass
The service elevator shaft was a vertical wind tunnel of freezing air and greased cables. Rowan moved through the hidden maintenance crawlways like a ghost through walls. He knew every bolt, every secondary circuit breaker, every hollow cavity behind the drywall.
""Maintenance chute connects to the freight lobby at floor seventy,"" Rowan whispered, pulling me into a narrow access tunnel lined with high-voltage conduits.
Behind us, a muffled thud-thud-thud echoed through the drywall. Derek’s hitmen were breaching the archive, using specialized breaching charges to obliterate the reinforced steel doors.
""Find them!"" Derek’s muffled scream echoed down the ventilation shaft. ""Check the emergency stairs! Kill the girl first—she saw the ledgers! And put Rowan down like the sick dog he is! Make it look like an overdose!""
Rowan didn't even blink. His face had settled into an emotionless mask of pure tactical calculation. But his fingers reached back into the darkness, finding mine, intertwining our fingers in a fierce, unbreakable grip.
""Stay close,"" he commanded softly.
We dropped through an acoustic ceiling tile into the executive boardroom on the seventy-fourth floor. The room was dark, illuminated only by the panoramic view of the storm-lashed Chicago skyline. Lightning tore across the sky, casting stark, bone-white shadows across the mahogany conference table.
The glass doors to the corridor burst open.
Two armed men in tactical gear poured into the room, their weapon lights cutting through the darkness. Before the beams could catch us, Rowan grabbed a heavy bronze architectural model of the city and hurled it through the central floor-to-ceiling window.
The sound was apocalyptic.
Tempered safety glass shattered outward into the rainy void eighty floors above the pavement. The sudden drop in barometric pressure sucked the heavy curtains outward, creating a deafening hurricane inside the boardroom. The howling wind of Lake Michigan screamed into the room at seventy miles per hour, knocking the first hitman off balance.
In the confusion, Rowan moved with startling lethality. He wasn't weak; his physical therapy and obsessive daily workouts had given him deceptive, coiled power. He lunged low, sweeping the first gunman’s legs out from under him. The man hit the polished hardwood floor with a sickening crack, his assault rifle skittering toward my feet.
I didn't hesitate. I kicked the rifle through the gaping hole in the window, watching it vanish into the rainy abyss.
The second gunman raised his sidearm directly toward Rowan’s head.
""Rowan!"" I screamed, grabbing an executive chair and shoving it with all my strength across the slick floor.
The heavy leather chair struck the gunman's knees just as he pulled the trigger. The shot went wide, shattering a glass display cabinet behind us. Rowan surged upward like an uncoiled spring, driving his elbow into the man’s throat, followed by a vicious strike to the temple. The hitman collapsed into a motionless heap.
Footsteps echoed rapidly down the hall. More were coming.
""The private express elevator,"" Rowan said, breathing heavily, pulling me out into the corridor. He swiped his master keycard and punched in a seven-digit bypass code. The heavy stainless-steel doors parted instantly.
We tumbled inside, and the elevator began its stomach-dropping descent at forty miles per hour.
Inside the mirrored cubicle, Rowan collapsed against the wall, his chest heaving. The sensory barrage—the screaming wind, the shattering glass, the gunfire—was finally catching up to him. His hands began to shake violently. He reached into his pocket for the brass puzzle, but his fingers were trembling too hard to manipulate the channels.
He was hyperventilating, his eyes dilating in terror as his nervous system overloaded.
""Rowan,"" I said softly, stepping directly into his personal space.
I didn't touch him roughly. I placed both of my hands over his ears, muffling the high-pitched whine of the elevator descent. I brought my forehead close to his, close enough that he could feel the warmth of my breath.
""One,"" I whispered, holding his gaze. ""Two. Three.""
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Rowan’s wild, panicked eyes locked onto mine. The trembling in his hands slowed. Slowly, he raised his hands and placed them over mine, pressing my palms tighter against his ears, filtering out the world until there was nothing left except my voice and the rhythm.
""I've got you,"" I whispered. ""We're going to tear Derek's empire to the ground.""
