Chapter 47
FORTY-SEVEN
Heather Bowman watched the pale sliver of dawn bleed across the windowpane, her reflection half-swallowed by the growing light.
The villa was quiet, its silence unnatural and sterile, like the rooms had been wiped clean of humanity long before they arrived.
She pulled the knit shawl tighter over her shoulders, hiding the surgical tape that still clung behind her ear.
The ache throbbed, dull and constant but not as sharp as what twisted in her chest.
Vos had disappeared. So had Scour.
Heather sat on the edge of the bed they never shared anymore and slid open the drawer he rarely touched.
Inside was the thin file folder. Photos.
Scans. Notes from the Prague clinic. Bloodwork.
And the sonogram he stole—the blurry grayscale curve of a spine, a faint hand curled in the dark. Claire’s baby. Her grandchild.
She ran her thumb along the edge of the printout, fighting the pull in her chest. A child she would never hold. She should have stopped this months ago, years ago. But the truth was harder—she hadn’t.
She had carried a child of Lucien’s, lost it, and that loss hollowed her.
Afterward, she didn’t want to try again.
Joe wanted a child, so she listened to Lucien.
She told herself it was strategy. Joe adored Claire.
Heather convinced herself that was enough.
Lucien whispered that Claire could serve a larger purpose, and Heather believed him.
By the time Claire’s genius burned bright, Joe was dead, Lucien was in a Russian pit, and Ian Chase was the one giving Claire the life she deserved. Heather told herself that made sense. That it was balance. That it wasn’t her fault.
And yet, when Lucien came back, twisted with vengeance, she let him in again. She told herself she had no choice, that she was surviving. But even now, staring at the sonogram, she knew that wasn’t the whole truth.
She had naively and selfishly thought she might hold her grandchild. That some piece of what she lost could be mended through Claire’s child.
But Vos never wanted healing. He wanted design.
He never broke people with force. He peeled them open, found the creases in loyalty, the hunger for relevance, the ache for redemption, and he had found hers.
For him, Claire’s baby wasn’t family. It was a blueprint. The child would be a genius like her mother, with strength like her father, shaped without compromise. The baby would not be raised but engineered. A weapon where Claire had failed.
Heather pressed the sonogram flat against her palm, the longing rising sharp as grief. I should have stopped this. But I... I didn’t. And maybe it was too late anyway.
Heather closed the drawer softly. She didn’t believe in redemption, just consequences. And they were coming.
She glanced down at her hands, spotting the faint tremor, not age but fear. Guilt, that was worse. In the mirror, her face was new. A stranger had survived the surgery. But behind the eyes, she was still Heather. And she was finally starting to regret it.
She slipped into the guest bath, locked the door, and turned on the water. Her hands shook as she pulled the encrypted device from her makeup case, hidden in the false bottom. It was coded to an old diplomatic frequency.
She keyed in the contact. She didn’t need to write a message. She only needed to hit send. The signal would piggyback on a dormant embassy protocol and ping Ian’s private queue at Chase International. Just one small signal. Was she too late? She had one tiny tendril of remorse.
A shadow passed behind the frosted glass. “Everything alright in there? One of the guards called.”
CHASE INTERNATIONAL – D.C. OPS HUB – 2333 HOURS
The alert came in as a ghost-ping on a forgotten diplomatic channel. Kieran, still in Denver, caught it first, flagged in the vault queue under a legacy encryption only one person would know. Heather. He was immediately on the phone to Ian.
Ian leaned over the terminal. “Time stamp?”
“Three minutes ago,” Kieran replied, pulling the signal. “Origin—Montenegro. No content.”
“She’s trying to warn us.”
The perimeter alert sounded next, but not from Montenegro. From Denver. Ian’s breathing went still.
Kieran’s voice dropped to lethal calm. “Ian… he’s not over there. He’s here.”
CHASE DENVER – REHAB SUITE, PRIVATE WING – 2103 HOURS
The pain never truly left Reid. It shifted instead, coiling beneath his skin like hot wire through old wounds.
His leg ached from standing too long. His ribs burned each time he drew a breath.
His hand, the one fractured during the attack, trembled from the strain of holding weight.
None of it mattered because something was wrong.
It was at the change of shift that he noticed it.
A new tech checking Claire’s IV carried her shoulders too square and moved too quickly.
The second new tech’s gloves were oversized, his fingers clumsy, his touch without the natural dexterity of someone who had done this work a thousand times before.
The nurse was worst of all. She stood motionless, not attentive but waiting, her gaze sharpened to a point, her stance braced as if expecting violence.
Claire lay in the custom hospital bed Chase had designed years earlier for Troy Bremen. Her eyes tracked the same details he did, and he knew instantly she felt it too.
He sat beside her. “Claire,” his voice tightened into a command, “scoot down, behind me. Now.”
She obeyed immediately, sliding back against the mattress, flattening her body. There was no argument, no hesitation, and that obedience hit Reid harder than the pain in his chest. She knew this was real.
The overheads cut out, and the emergency strobes snapped alive, pulsing red and white in a jagged rhythm. Reid’s stomach dropped.
A hiss followed—the sound of a magnetic lock disengaging.
The side door unsealed, the one no one else should have been able to access. Reid pivoted toward it, every nerve screaming in warning. A man stepped through—Vos’s number one, his chief assassin. The man whispered of in old dossiers under one name: Scour.
He was tall and dressed in dark civilian clothes. His face had filled out since the old intelligence briefs, but his eyes remained the same—cold, evil, ruthless.
“Reid Hanlon,” Scour’s voice was dry and edged with mockery, “still playing bodyguard?”
Reid did not answer. His gaze cut to the “techs,” who had already dropped their pretense. Their stances shifted, and their hands moved toward weapons. They were predators revealing their teeth.
The first attacker came fast. Reid pivoted, ignoring the burst of agony across his ribs, and drove his elbow into the man’s nose. The crack was brutal, blood spraying as the man folded.
The second lunged, weapon half drawn. Reid caught his wrist, twisted, and tore the weapon free, pain flaring white-hot down his arm. A bone snapped, but not his own.
The nurse came last, a knife flashing. Reid planted his stance, turned, and kicked her so hard, her body crashed against the vitals console. Glass shattered, alarms shrieked from the monitors, and she did not rise again.
Three were down.
Reid staggered, his lungs burning, his vision pulsing black at the edges. His body screamed for collapse, but he remained upright.
Scour had not moved. He stepped over his own fallen people as though they were nothing, and his eyes locked on Reid. His voice remained calm, precise, and certain, as if the outcome had already been written.
“I came for her.” Scour’s gaze flicked to Claire before returning to Reid. “Vos may not be here, but his will is. You think you are enough to stop me?”
The strobes froze the moment in harsh light.
Blood was slick across the walls. Glass was scattered on the floor.
Reid was unsteady but refused to fall. He grabbed his weapon from the bedside table beside Claire, maintaining his stance as he raised it.
“You will not take her.” His voice was carved from stone.
Scour’s mouth curved into a smirk. “Won’t, or can’t? You are nothing more than scar tissue holding a gun, Hanlon. You will fall first. And when you do, she is mine.”
Claire pressed tighter against the side bedrail, her palm locked to her stomach, terror and rage twisting her features. Scour thought he could take her child. He thought he could claim her for Vos.
Reid shifted forward, fully blocking her from Scour’s sight. “Over my dead body.”
Scour tilted his head, studying Reid like a wolf considering prey. “That’s the idea. She was ours before you knew her name. And the child…” his eyes cut to Claire again, cold and claiming, “…will be the future you’ll never touch.”
Reid spoke again, “You don’t know a goddamn thing about me or my child.”
For the first time, Scour faltered. The smirk slipped.
Reid did not wait. The first of two gunshots tore through the room.
The recoils ripped fire through his arm, but the rounds struck true.
Scour staggered backward, eyes wide in shock, as if refusing gravity itself.
Then his body collapsed to the floor with stone-heavy finality, blood spreading in a dark pool beneath him.
The strobes fractured the room into violent flashes. Reid stood at the center of it, a man who looked like he might collapse but refused to.
The gunshots cracked the air open. Smoke curled. The man stumbled, eyes widening with shock, and then his body folded to the ground.
Claire’s scream locked tight in her chest. She clung to the bedrail with white knuckles, her heart hammering so hard, she thought it might split through her ribs. Her breath caught high in her throat, trapped.
Reid stood in front of her, still shielding her, his weapon raised and steady even though his whole frame trembled. He hadn’t hesitated.
She stared past him at the body crumpled in the flickering light. Scour—Vos’s number one. Dead.
Her vision blurred, the strobes burning her eyes raw. Beneath the adrenaline, a sharper thought cut through her fear: If Scour was here… where is Vos?
The corpses covering the floor were not the end—only a piece. The real danger was still out there.
Her pulse roared in her ears as she gripped the rail tighter, unable to move, unable to look away from Reid’s back. He had saved her again. But the fire curling in her chest told her the truth. This wasn’t finished until Vos himself was gone.
Reid’s arms shook, the sound of the shots echoing in his ears. His weapon wavered in his grip. His ribs screamed with each breath, and his entire body pleaded with him to collapse, but he held himself upright, shielding Claire with what strength remained.
Seconds later, the door burst open as boots thundered in. Kieran held point, his rifle raised, with Tree Town One fanning out behind him in disciplined formation. Their weapons snapped to targets, eyes sweeping the corners of the room, every angle checked.
Four bodies lay sprawled on the floor. Blood pooled dark across the wood, and the vitals console sparked where the nurse had been thrown against it. At the center lay Scour, Vos’s number one, his shadow. His assassin lay dead at Reid’s feet.
“Clear!” Kieran barked, his voice cutting through the alarms.
Operators moved quickly, checking pulses, securing weapons, and confirming what was already evident. There were no survivors. One man crouched, rolling Scour’s head to verify the assassin was gone.
Kieran stepped forward, his face grim and his weapon still raised. “Reid… talk to me.”
Reid’s mouth was dry. His eyes moved past Kieran, drawn once more to the body on the floor.
For years, Scour had been the hidden blade in Vos’s hand, the name whispered in dossiers and intercepts.
Now he was nothing more than an empty stare under the strobe lights.
Reid had ended him with two perfect shots, and by all accounts, it should have felt like victory.
Instead, a jagged thought cut through him with merciless clarity. If Scour was here, then where was Vos?
His gaze shifted to Claire, pale against the bed, her hand still pressed protectively to her stomach. Relief and terror crashed against each other in his chest. He had ended the assassination team. But the mastermind was still out there, watching and waiting.
That realization dragged at him until his weapon dipped slightly in his hands. His legs trembled under the burden of exhaustion and the knowledge that this was not over. Reid was not sure whether he had ended something or if he had only opened the door to what came next.
Silence settled over the suite, broken only by the alarms and a single voice. Claire’s. “Reid…” Her voice was faint, almost lost.
He turned and saw her curled in on herself, blood spilling in a dark rush over her thighs. His chest seemed to split open at the sight. “No… no, no… Claire…” The words came out raw, barely more than a choked whisper.
He dropped to his knees beside her, pain exploding through his side and leg, but he ignored it. His arms went around her instantly, gathering her against him, his hands already slick with her blood. “Help is coming.” He held her close as if he could keep her from slipping away. “You hold on to me.”
Her eyelids fluttered, struggling to stay open, fighting to remain present. Her breaths came, shallow and broken.
Reid pressed his comm, his voice low but shaking as he forced the words out. “Tuck. Hemorrhage. Rehab Suite. Now.”
He turned back to her, cupping her face in both hands, pressing his forehead against hers. “I love you,” he whispered, his voice breaking. “I’ve never loved anyone more. Stay with me. Please. For me. For our baby.”
Her fingers curled weakly into his shirt, a desperate anchor holding her to him.
“Stay. Please stay.”
The suite filled suddenly with the movement of medical personnel, voices crisp and commanding, equipment snapping into place. But Reid didn’t move. He didn’t look away from her. Not until Tuck arrived, shoving him gently but firmly aside to take over.