Chapter 10
Chapter 10: The Red Horizon
With a sudden, explosive surge of adrenaline, Clara didn't scream—she acted. She slammed her weight sideways, toppling her heavy iron chair directly into the man's legs. The man stumbled backward, his balance shattered, his grip loosening on the baby.
"Daniel!" Clara screamed through her gag.
Daniel fired three shots in rapid succession. Two caught the man in the chest; the third shattered the spotlight. Darkness engulfed the warehouse. Daniel lunged forward blindly, his hands catching Alejandro just inches before the baby hit the concrete floor. He rolled into the shadows behind a steel shipping container as automatic gunfire erupted from hidden snipers in the rafters, sparks flying off the metal structures.
"Clara! Hold onto me!" Daniel yelled over the deafening noise, cutting her ropes with a pocket knife in the dark.
They burst through a rusted fire exit just as the building behind them erupted into a massive fireball—a ruptured fuel line catching a stray bullet. They ran into the freezing rain, escaping into the crowded, chaotic streets of the city docks, disappearing into the anonymity of the night.
Three days later. A remote, off-grid cabin in the deep woods of Maine.
The fire crackled softly in the stone hearth. Alejandro was safely asleep in Clara’s arms by the fire. They had survived. The Mendoza empire was completely gone, burned to ash by the media scandal, the deaths of the board members, and the sudden collapse of Aethelgard's front companies. They were free. They were nobody.
Daniel sat at the rough wooden kitchen table, staring at his rugged, encrypted laptop screen. Before the warehouse blew up, he had managed to copy a hidden sub-file from the Aethelgard drive. It was a medical report dated just one week before Clara’s abduction.
His eyes scanned the DNA comparison chart. The rows of numbers. The genetic markers. The paternal sequence.
Daniel’s breath hitched in his throat. The room seemed to spin. His vision blurred.
The official lab results showed a 0.0% paternal match between Daniel and Alejandro. But it showed a 100% genetic match to the male Mendoza lineage. Not Daniel.
His brother, Tomás.
Daniel slowly looked up from the screen. By the window, Clara was softly singing a lullaby to the baby, her face illuminated by the warm firelight. She looked beautiful. She looked peaceful. But for the first time, Daniel noticed the cold, calculating look in her eyes as she stared down at the child. Did she know? Had she always known?
May you like
Suddenly, the burner phone on the table—a phone no one had the number to—vibrated. A text message popped up on the black screen.
Did you really think she chose you because she loved you, Daniel? Thank you for protecting our investment. Welcome to the family.
