Since you brought her to Christmas, I brought someone too, his pregnant nurse wife said before the Chicago boss walked in

“Get down!” Silas roared.

He grabbed Fiona by the hair and threw her behind the heavy mahogany desk, diving over Serena and Marcus just as a massive concussive blast blew the oak doors entirely off their hinges.

Splinters of wood and chunks of stone flew across the room like shrapnel. Smoke poured into the study, thick and choking.

Before the smoke could clear, Silas popped up from behind his human shield, his pistol barking three times in rapid succession. Two of Vargas’s men, stepping through the ruined doorway, dropped instantly to the floor, dead before they even knew what hit them.

Silas ducked back down as a hail of automatic gunfire shredded the walls of the study, destroying the oil paintings and shattering the battery-powered lantern. The room was plunged back into darkness, lit only by the strobe-light flashes of muzzle fire.

“Matthias!” Silas yelled over the deafening noise. “Where is the laptop?!”

Matthias was curled in a fetal position beneath a leather sofa, sobbing hysterically. “In the safe! Behind the painting!”

Silas crawled across the floor, avoiding the incoming fire. He reached the safe, punched in the code he forced out of Matthias with a brutal kick, and yanked out a sleek silver laptop.

He crawled back to the desk and threw the laptop at Matthias.

“Log in,” Silas commanded, pressing the hot barrel of his gun against the back of Matthias’s neck. “Transfer the twelve million to the offshore routing numbers I am going to give you. Now.”

“They’ll kill me!” Matthias screamed.

“I will blow your head off in five seconds if you don't type,” Silas promised, his voice devoid of all mercy. “Five. Four. Three...”

Matthias’s trembling, bloody hands flew across the keyboard. The screen illuminated his terrified face in a pale blue glow. Silas rattled off a series of complex routing numbers—Serena recognized them vaguely as untraceable accounts Silas used for his legitimate shell companies.

“It’s transferring!” Matthias cried. “It takes a minute to clear the international protocols!”

Outside the door, the gunfire stopped.

A heavy silence fell over the corridor, broken only by the sound of slow, deliberate footsteps crunching over the shattered oak doors.

A man stepped into the smoke-filled doorway. He was tall, wearing a bespoke suit underneath a tactical vest. He held an assault rifle lazily in one hand. This was Vargas.

“Silas Vance,” Vargas called out into the dark room. “You fight well for a man trapped in a corner. But the game is over. My men have the rest of your enforcers pinned downstairs. Stand up, and let’s handle this like businessmen.”

Silas looked at the laptop screen.

Transfer Complete.

He grabbed the laptop, smashed it viciously against the edge of the mahogany desk until the screen shattered and the hard drive cracked, effectively destroying the physical digital keys.