Chapter 66
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The firefight in the subterranean corridor was brief, brutal, and entirely one-sided.
Marcus had designed the Whitmore security grid for exactly this kind of siege. The moment the mercenaries raised their weapons, Marcus slammed a button on his tactical belt. High-intensity strobe lights embedded in the ceiling activated instantly, flashing with a blinding, disorienting brilliance that completely overloaded the mercenaries' night-vision goggles.
Before the intruders could tear their goggles off, Marcus and his team opened fire. They didn't use lethal rounds; they used specialized, high-impact kinetic pacification rounds designed to shatter ribs and instantly incapacitate a target without killing them.
The heavy thud of the kinetic rounds hitting tactical armor echoed wildly. Within ten seconds, five of the six mercenaries were on the floor, groaning in agony, completely neutralized.
The leader of the extraction team, a massive man who had managed to duck behind a concrete pillar, ripped his blinded goggles off and blindly fired a suppressed burst down the hallway.
The bullets shattered the plaster wall exactly two feet to Noah's left.
Noah didn't even blink.
Marcus moved with terrifying, fluid speed. He flanked the pillar, grabbed the mercenary leader's rifle by the hot barrel, wrenched it out of his hands, and delivered a devastating, precision strike to the side of the man's knee. The leader collapsed with a howl of pain, entirely subdued.
The strobe lights ceased, replaced by the calm, steady emergency lighting.
The smoke cleared to reveal Elias Thorne's elite extraction team lying completely broken on the floor of the Whitmore estate.
"Zip-tie them," Marcus ordered his team, breathing heavily but entirely uninjured. "Check them for secondary weapons. Secure the perimeter."
Noah walked slowly down the corridor, his expensive shoes crunching over the shattered plaster and spent kinetic casings. He stopped in front of the mercenary leader, who was glaring up at him with a mixture of hatred and shock.
"Thorne didn't pay you enough for this," Noah said coldly, looking down at the man. "You just assaulted a protected facility. You are going to federal prison for the rest of your life."
Noah turned around and walked back to Julian's room. He knocked on the glass before pushing the door open.
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Julian was staring at the doorway in absolute awe. The monsters had come for him, and for the first time in his entire life, the monsters had lost.
"It's over, Julian," Noah smiled softly. "You're safe."
