Chapter 4
I moved before thought.
Pain ripped through my shoulder as I shoved Sarah and Lily behind a stone planter.
The first shot cracked through the conservatory glass.
People screamed.
Leaves exploded above us.
Vincent fired back from behind a pillar, his body placed between us and the street with the calm precision of a man who had chosen long ago where he would die if needed.
Lily screamed.
Not a normal scream.
A sound that tore through me.
Sarah covered Lily’s body with her own.
I crouched over both of them, useless with one arm and a heart pounding too fast for the disease inside it.
“Stay down,” I ordered.
Sarah looked at me.
Her eyes were wild.
“This is your protection?”
The words hit harder than glass.
Another shot.
A security guard fell near the entrance.
Not dead.
Hit in the leg.
Vincent shouted into comms.
“Two shooters! North curb! Move civilians out the west exit!”
I reached for the gun I should not have brought.
Sarah saw it.
Her face went pale.
Lily saw it too.
For one second, my daughter looked at me not as the man she had just given a face to, but as the danger her mother had always feared.
I froze.
Then I handed the gun to Vincent’s second man, who appeared from behind a column.
“Get them out,” I said.
Sarah grabbed my coat.
“No. You come with us.”
My heart stumbled.
“I am.”
But when I stood, the room tilted.
The monitor was gone, but my body had its own alarm.
A hard thump.
Then a pause.
Too long.
My knees weakened.
Sarah saw.
“Adrian?”
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t lie.”
A third shot hit the planter.
Stone dust burst across my face.
Vincent grabbed my arm.
“Move.”
We ran bent low through the humid green maze.
Lily sobbed against Sarah’s chest.
I wanted to carry her.
I could not even carry myself properly.
That shame burned.
At the west exit, a delivery corridor opened into an alley.
Two of my men had the armored SUV ready.
Sarah climbed in with Lily.
I followed, breath sharp, shoulder bleeding through the bandage.
Vincent slammed the door.
The vehicle lurched forward.
Only then did Lily speak.
Her voice was tiny.
“Did the bad people come because of me?”
“No,” I said instantly.
She flinched at how fast I answered.
I softened my voice.
“No, sweetheart. They came because of me.”
Sarah’s eyes flashed.
“And now they know she exists.”
I had no defense.
No speech.
No strategy.
Only truth.
“Yes.”
Sarah turned away, holding Lily tighter.
The words I wanted to say crowded my throat.
I’m sorry.
I’ll fix it.
I’ll protect you.
But apologies in armored cars after gunfire are cheap.
So I stayed silent.
Halfway to the safe house, my heart misfired again.
This time, the pain was not in my shoulder.
It was deep.
Electric.
Wrong.
My vision narrowed.
Vincent noticed first.
“Boss?”
I tried to wave him off.
My hand did not obey.
Sarah leaned forward.
“Adrian?”
Lily looked up from her mother’s arms.
“What’s wrong?”
Nothing, I wanted to say.
But no lies.
“My heart,” I managed.
Vincent cursed and shouted for the driver to divert to the private clinic.
The world blurred.
Lily cried, “Don’t die.”
That was the last thing I heard before everything went black.
I woke under white lights.
Dr. Maren’s voice cut through the fog.
“He needs the defibrillator implanted now.”
Someone said, “Consent?”
Vincent answered, “He signed it.”
Sarah’s voice came next.
“Will he live?”
A pause.
The kind doctors think patients cannot hear.
“He has a chance.”
A chance.
My life had been reduced to the word I had denied Sarah and Lily for three years.
When I woke properly, there was a bandage beneath my collarbone and a dull ache in my chest.
The device was inside me.
A small machine ready to shock my heart if it tried to abandon my daughter again.
Sarah sat beside the bed.
Lily slept curled in a chair, wrapped in Vincent’s jacket.
I looked at Sarah.
“I’m sorry.”
She stared at me.
“You keep saying that with your eyes.”
“I need to say it with my mouth.”
“It doesn’t fix anything.”
“I know.”
Her voice broke.
“She asked if she killed you by meeting you.”
My eyes closed.
Pain moved through me deeper than any wound.
“She didn’t.”
“I know that. She doesn’t.”
I looked at Lily.
Small.
Exhausted.
Too close to my world after one morning with me.
“I’ll send you both away,” I said.
Sarah laughed bitterly.
“To where? You think distance is protection? We already tried your distance.”
She stood.
“No more decisions about us without us.”
I looked at her.
She was shaking, but not weak.
Never weak.
“What do you want?”
“I want the truth. All of it. Who Volkov is. Why he wants you dead. What Lily and I need to survive this. And then I want choices.”
“You should hate me.”
“I do.”
The honesty landed.
Then she looked at Lily.
“But she has spent three years loving a blank space. So if you are going to be in her life, you will be real. Not a shadow. Not a file. Real.”
I nodded.
“Okay.”
Sarah leaned close.
“And if you bring one more bullet near my child without telling me exactly what war we are in, I will disappear so well even your Vincent won’t find us.”
For the first time in years, I smiled.
May you like
Not because it was funny.
Because I believed her.
