Chapter 7: The Burner Loft
The agonizingly tense train ride took exactly twenty minutes.
They aggressively got off the train in a gritty, entirely abandoned industrial district, miles away from the polished, towering glass skyscrapers of the city center.
Cole led her silently through a confusing, winding maze of rotting brick warehouses and rusted shipping containers until they finally reached a nondescript, heavily rusted steel door. He punched a complex, fourteen-digit code into a hidden keypad, and they quickly slipped inside the darkness.
The safe house was a massive, converted industrial loft.
It was entirely sparse and utilitarian. There was a cheap military cot in the corner, a metal folding table, a massive steel rack of heavy, military-grade weapons, and a glowing wall of high-tech computer monitors.
Cole violently slammed the heavy steel door shut and aggressively engaged three separate, massive deadbolts.
“Sit,” he commanded, pointing a calloused finger to a cheap folding chair.
He walked over to a humming mini-fridge and tossed her a freezing bottle of water. Haley caught it, her hands shaking so violently she could barely unscrew the plastic cap.
She took a long, desperate drink, then looked up at him. She needed to ask the question that was loudly ringing in her head.
“Did you kill those men in the alley?”
“Yes,” Cole stated simply, completely devoid of any emotion or remorse.
He began pulling off his heavy, kevlar-lined tactical vest. Underneath, his black t-shirt was completely stuck to his muscular chest with cold sweat.
“I didn’t want to,” Haley whispered, staring at the floor. “I didn’t want anyone to die over me.”
Cole stopped moving. He turned and looked at her, his dark eyes intense and unyielding.
“It was them, or it was you, Princess,” Cole said, his gravelly voice dropping an octave. “I forcefully chose you. I will always choose you. Do not lose sleep over dead mercenaries who accepted blood money to put a bullet in your brain.”
He completely turned his back on her, walking over to the glowing computer terminal and aggressively typing furiously on the mechanical keyboard.
“The digital jammer they used was localized entirely to that black van,” Cole muttered, staring intensely at the scrolling green code on the monitors. “So I should be able to force a secure encrypted signal out from this terminal and reach your—”
Cole stopped typing. He cursed loudly and violently punched the metal desk.
“What? What’s wrong?!” Haley demanded, instantly standing up, the plastic water bottle crinkling in her tight grip.
“The network is entirely down,” Cole said, spinning his chair around to face her. “Not just my private military comms, Haley. The entire city’s cellular and broadband grid is experiencing a massive, targeted ‘temporary outage’.”
Cole stood up, his face hardening into a terrifying mask.
“Stefano Rossi isn’t just a violent, bloodthirsty street thug,” Cole explained, pacing the floor. “He is actively working with someone who possesses massive, state-sponsored cyber capabilities. This isn’t a random hit. This is a highly coordinated, multi-million dollar siege.”
Haley walked slowly over to the dusty, reinforced window, cautiously peering through the slats of the broken blinds at the dark street below.
“Why?” Haley whispered into the darkness. “Why go to all this impossible trouble just for me? I’m nobody. I’m just a girl who paints.”
“Because you are the only living thing on this earth that Alexander Sterling genuinely loves,” Cole said, his rough voice suddenly growing surprisingly soft.
He walked up behind her, keeping a safe distance, but his presence was a massive wall of heat in the freezing room.
“Stefano aggressively wants to capture you alive,” Cole explained. “He wants to violently trade you. Your life, for his brother Gabriel’s freedom, and the immediate return of his entire criminal territory.”
Haley turned around, her back pressed against the freezing glass window. Her dark eyes, previously wide with panic, suddenly hardened into sharp, unyielding obsidian.
“I absolutely will not be a pathetic bargaining chip,” Haley stated, her voice dropping all of its previous trembling fear. “I spent my entire adult life hiding in the shadows from this violent world. I am not going to let some psychotic mobster violently stuff me back into a box.”
Cole looked at her. He really, truly looked at her for the very first time.
He didn’t see a spoiled, useless mafia princess anymore. He saw the fiercely defiant waitress who had fearlessly stood her ground and talked back to Gabriel Rossi seconds after being brutally assaulted.
“Good,” Cole said, a small, incredibly dangerous smile touching the corner of his scarred lips. “Because I absolutely do not plan on surrendering to those—”
Click.
The humming power in the entire industrial loft violently cut out.
The glowing computer monitors instantly went pitch black. The overhead fluorescent lights died with a sickening pop. The loft was plunged into absolute, suffocating darkness.
Haley loudly gasped, her heart violently skipping a beat.
“Stay absolutely still,” Cole whispered in the pitch darkness, his voice vibrating with sudden, terrifying urgency.
A tiny, glowing red laser dot suddenly appeared exactly in the center of Haley’s chest.
Cole moved faster than humanly possible.
He violently tackled her hard to the wooden floor just as a massive, high-caliber sniper bullet punched violently through the reinforced glass window, completely obliterating the metal folding chair she had been standing next to just a millisecond before. The deafening crack of the rifle echoed loudly across the city block.
“Sniper!” Cole hissed, dragging her violently by her collar behind the heavy steel weapons rack. “They found us! How the hell did they find a burner loft?!”
Haley scrambled in the dark, her hands desperately patting her pockets.
“My phone,” Haley gasped, pulling the cracked plastic device from her pocket. “I still have my old burner phone! The one I used to call my dad at the restaurant!”
Cole violently ripped the glowing phone from her trembling hand. Without a single word, he slammed the heel of his heavy combat boot down on the screen, violently shattering it into a hundred useless pieces of plastic and glass.
“They actively tracked the GPS signal,” Cole growled, drawing his weapon. “We have to move right now.”
But as they began to painfully crawl on their bellies toward the reinforced back exit, the terrifying sound of heavy combat boots surrounding the brick building echoed in the dark. There were dozens of them.
Then, a loud, violently distorted voice boomed from an electronic megaphone outside. It was a voice entirely dripping with arrogant madness.
“Come out, little Princess!” Stefano Rossi’s voice echoed through the broken window. “We have the entire building heavily surrounded! Send out the girl with her hands on her head, and the bodyguard dies quickly! Resist, and I swear to God I will slowly peel him apart while you are forced to watch!”
