Read Chapter 26: Cracking Point

The door to Pascal’s boiler room flat exploded inward with a sound like a cannon shot, and the first bullet took out the cinderblock wall six inches from Zoe’s head. She screamed, dropping the tablet she’d been using to map Viktor’s flight corridor, and dove behind a rusted filing cabinet.

Alex was already moving. Instinct, muscle memory from a life spent running through worse than this. He grabbed the ledger off the workbench—thick, leather-bound, the weight of six years and his brother’s life inside it—and shoved it into his jacket. The fabric came away wet. His shoulder wound had torn again.

Boots hammered up the stairwell. Multiple sets. Three, maybe four. A voice in French bellowed orders. Pascal’s contacts hadn’t sold them out. Viktor had his own way of finding rats.

“Zoe! Exit!”

She pointed to a rusted maintenance door at the back wall. “It leads to the incinerator chute. If we can get to the service alley—“

Another burst of automatic fire chewed through the flat’s flimsy doorframe. Jules appeared from the adjacent storage room, laptop bag slung across his chest, eyes wide and white in the gloom. “They’re coming up hot,” he said, voice cracking. “Two more on the roof access.”

Alex moved. He kicked the maintenance door open, felt the cool draft of the chute shaft beyond. Zoe slipped through first, her slight frame almost vanishing into the gap. Alex pushed Jules toward it.

“Go. Go now.”

Jules hesitated, fingers scrambling for the strap of his bag. A moment of pure, lethal grace. In that hesitation, the first hitman cleared the doorway behind them. Black tactical vest. Balaclava. The muzzle of an MP5 tracked toward Jules’s spine.

Alex had two options. He had the ledger. He had the only copy of everything Luca had given the authorities, everything Viktor had spent six years trying to bury. If he took the chute, he made it out. Jules would either die or get taken, but Alex could still reach the heliport before sunset.

He didn’t take the chute.

Alex launched himself forward, catching the hitman’s rifle barrel and driving it upward a split second before the trigger squeezed. Rounds stitched across the ceiling. Plaster rained down. Alex’s bad shoulder screamed as he wrenched the weapon sideways, using momentum to spin the man into his partner.

“Jules! GO!”

But Jules was frozen. A third man had him now, an arm locked around his throat, pistol pressed to his temple. The kid’s eyes locked on Alex’s with an expression that wasn’t fear. It was apology.

“Take it,” Jules said, voice thin. “Take the bag.”

The laptop bag. The one Jules had kept slung across his chest through every checkpoint, every close call. Alex had assumed it held his rigging tools. He saw now what it really was.

“I kept a backup,” Jules said. “For a day like this. Different code. Different key.” The hitman’s arm tightened. Jules’s face went purple. “I’m sorry, Ace. I thought I could sell it.”

Alex couldn’t breathe. The ledger felt like fire against his ribs. He had the brother he’d mourned for six years waiting in a jet at the heliport. He had a deadline at sunset. He had a deal with the COO that expired at dawn.

And Jules was about to be taken.

“You were going to sell me?” Alex said, and the words tasted like ash.

“No,” Jules choked. “I was going to buy myself out.” A pause. “Until you started acting like you cared.”

The fourth hitman came through the door and fired wide, forcing Alex back toward the chute. Zoe’s voice screamed from below. A single name. His name.

Alex looked at Jules. The kid’s eyes said it all. *Run. Don’t waste it.*

He wanted to argue. He wanted to burn the whole building down around them. But the ledger was the only weapon he had. The only thing that would save Luca.

“I’ll find you,” Alex said. He had no idea if it was true.

Then he dropped backward into the incinerator chute, and the darkness took him.

He hit a pile of ash and debris at the bottom, coughing, blind. Zoe hauled him to his feet. Above them, shots echoed in the stairwell. Then silence.

“They’ve got Jules,” Alex said, and the words were a knife in his own throat.

Zoe’s face was streaked with grime and blood. “I know.” Nothing else. She knew what that meant.

They stumbled out into a service alley reeking of diesel and rotting garbage. The afternoon sun was low, a smear of orange through the canyon of buildings. Sunset was maybe two hours off. Viktor’s jet would soon be fueled and preflighted, Luca seated inside it.

Alex pressed his hand to the ledger through his jacket. The stitches in his shoulder had burst. He could feel blood seeping down his ribs, hot and steady. He didn’t have time for a doctor.

“What do we do?” Zoe asked quietly.

For a moment, Alex could see every road folding into one—and all of them ending in the same graveyard. Save the brother, lose the crew. Save the crew, lose the brother. Lose both and it didn’t matter anymore, because if the ledger fell into Viktor’s hands, every name in it would burn.

He had a sunrise deadline with Delacroix. A sunset deadline with Viktor. And now a third clock was ticking—the one that counted down the minutes until the men who took Jules got tired of waiting for information he didn’t have and started cutting pieces off him to make the silence scream.

“Ace.” Zoe’s voice sharpened.

He looked up. She was holding her phone out, screen bright with a notification. One that made his blood run cold.

It was a photo. Jules, bound to a chair in an unfinished concrete room, mouth swollen, eyelids heavy. Below it, a caption in Russian:

*The boy has a price. Bring the book, or he learns what a slow death sounds like.*

Alex stared at it. Then he pulled the ledger from his jacket, held it up to the dying light, and ran his thumb along its cracked spine. The binding was loose. He pressed it just under the title, where a seam had split years ago, and something shifted.

He cracked the spine fully open for the first time.

Inside the back cover, in Luca’s handwriting, was a name that made the world tilt under his feet.

Not a buyer. Not a handler.

*Ana Kessler.* His mother’s maiden name. A woman who died fifteen years ago in a car crash he’d always suspected was staged.

Luca had hidden the truth in plain sight from the beginning.

And now Jules was in the hands of men who would carve him open to find it.