Chapter 3: The Interrogation
Marcus moved through the rain. He crossed the wet asphalt in absolute silence, his expensive Italian loafers completely ruined by the puddles, but he didn’t care.
He reached the heavy metal door she had just breached. It was resting unlocked.
He drew his Sig Sauer, holding the cold steel tight against his chest, and slipped into the darkness.
The interior of the warehouse was cavernous and freezing. It smelled strongly of wet rust, decaying concrete, and the unmistakable metallic tang of old blood.
The only illumination came from a single, swaying caged bulb hanging high in the center of the massive room.
Marcus ducked silently behind a towering stack of wooden shipping pallets. He peered through the wooden slats.
He saw her. She was standing perfectly still in the dead center of the room, her back facing his hiding spot.
But she was not alone.
Tied securely to a heavy metal chair in the middle of the concrete floor was a man. He had been beaten brutally.
His face was a swollen mass of purple bruises, and his expensive tailored suit was shredded and soaked in blood.
Marcus squinted through the dim light. He recognized the battered face instantly.
It was Carl Vance. The sadistic nephew of Victor Vance, Marcus’s absolute biggest rival in the Chicago underworld.
Carl was a universally known monster. He was a man who deeply enjoyed hurting vulnerable women and helpless children.
The local police had never been able to touch him because the powerful Vance family bought every single judge in the district with cash.
“Wake up, Carl,” the blonde woman commanded.
Her voice was entirely different now. The raspy, quiet, submissive tone of his maid was completely gone.
This new voice was crystal clear, icy cold, and commanded the absolute authority of a seasoned executioner.
She raised her hand and slapped him brutally across the face. The sharp, violent crack echoed endlessly in the empty warehouse.
Carl groaned in agony, spitting a mouthful of thick blood onto the concrete. He looked up, his eyes swimming with a heavy concussion and naked fear.
“Who… who are you?” Carl slurred. “Do you have any idea who my uncle is?”
“I know exactly who your uncle is,” she replied smoothly, beginning to circle his chair like a starving shark. “And I know exactly what you did to the girl at the Indigo Club last week.”
She stopped moving. “The young waitress. Mia.”
Carl let out a wet, gurgling, arrogant laugh. “Who cares? She was an absolute nobody.”
The blonde woman stopped completely still. She leaned in dangerously close, her beautiful face mere inches from his battered one.
“She wasn’t a nobody,” she whispered with venomous rage. “She was my little sister.”
Marcus froze behind the wooden pallets.
The meticulous background dossier on ‘Sarah Jenkins’ stated clearly that she was an only child whose parents had died in a car crash. Everything was a perfectly fabricated lie.
“You have something I need, Carl,” she whispered, stepping back and casually pulling a deeply serrated combat knife from her tactical belt.
The jagged metal glinted menacingly in the dim yellow light.
“Your uncle is moving a massive shipment this Friday,” she stated. “The Red Ice. I want the exact location.”
“Go straight to hell,” Carl spat, blood flying from his lips.
She didn’t hesitate for a fraction of a second. She drove the serrated knife deep into the fleshy, unprotected part of his upper thigh.
Carl screamed. It was a high, tearing sound of pure agony that completely ripped through the silence of the warehouse.
She grabbed the hilt and twisted the jagged blade aggressively. Her face remained a completely unreadable, terrifying mask of stone.
“Wrong answer,” she said with chilling calmness. “We have all night, Carl. And I know human anatomy far better than your expensive private doctors.”
She pulled the blade out an inch. “I can comfortably keep you alive and in excruciating agony for days.”
Marcus’s mind was racing a thousand miles an hour. His quiet, submissive maid was a highly trained torture specialist.
She was systematically hunting the Vance crime family. This wasn’t just a simple, messy personal vendetta.
The terrifyingly calm way she handled the combat knife, the psychological pressure of her interrogation—it was military grade. It was black-ops.
At this exact moment, most crime bosses would have put a bullet in her back for bringing a war to their city. But Marcus couldn’t pull the trigger. Would you have walked away, or stayed to watch the monster bleed?
Before Carl could scream out the location, the situation spiraled into complete chaos.
The massive, corrugated metal bay doors at the far end of the warehouse rattled violently. Dozens of heavy tactical boots slammed against the wet pavement outside.
“POLICE! OPEN UP!” a voice boomed through a megaphone.
It was a total setup. A perfectly timed ambush.
The blonde woman’s head snapped up instantly. She analytically calculated the distance to the exits in a millisecond.
Then she looked down at the bleeding man in the chair. “Looks like it is your lucky day, you piece of trash,” she hissed.
She grabbed Carl viciously by his greasy hair and slammed his skull backward against the heavy metal chair. He was knocked completely unconscious instantly.
She turned on her heel and sprinted toward the dark back exit—running straight toward the shadows where Marcus was currently hiding.
Marcus had a split-second, life-altering choice to make.
If he stayed perfectly hidden in the shadows, she might run right past him and escape the police. If he stepped out, he would have to immediately explain why the most feared mob boss in Chicago was stalking his own housekeeper.
He stepped out from behind the wooden pallets. He kept his Sig Sauer lowered, but clearly visible in his massive hand.
“Sarah,” Marcus said calmly.
She skidded to a violent, abrupt halt. Her combat knife whipped up into a lethal, defensive reverse grip before her brain even registered who had spoken her fake name.
When her hazel eyes finally focused on him, they went incredibly wide. For the very first time that night, genuine, unadulterated shock cracked her icy mask.
“Mr. Thorne?”
“We need to go,” Marcus stated, ignoring the heavy police battering ram that just hit the front metal doors with a deafening, echoing boom. “Right now.”
She looked wildly at him, then at the buckling front doors, and then back at his calm face. She didn’t ask a single pointless question. She didn’t stammer in fear.
She simply gave one sharp nod.
“Follow me,” she commanded. “I already mapped an extraction route.”
“I thought you were just the maid,” Marcus muttered dryly, falling into an easy, synchronized step beside her as they sprinted toward a rusted service hatch set deep into the concrete floor.
She grabbed the heavy iron handle, glancing back at him over her shoulder. A dark, genuinely wicked smirk played on her lips—an expression he had never once seen inside his sterile penthouse.
“And I thought you were just an arrogant rich boy in a custom suit,” she shot back. “Grab the hatch. We are going underground.”
