Chapter 7 - The Rooftop Reckoning
The elevator doors ground open with a metallic shriek on the top floor, revealing the storm-swept helipad under the raging Baltimore rain.
Wind whipped across the open platform, driving sheets of cold rain into our faces. Parked on the concrete pad was a sleek, black twin-engine helicopter, its rotor blades spinning in a furious, deafening blur that drowned out the distant sounds of gunfire below.
Standing by the open cabin door, holding a smoking pistol and glaring back at us with wild, desperate eyes, was Marcus Vance.
“End of the line, Damian!” Marcus screamed over the roar of the rotors, his expensive suit soaked and ruined by the rain. He had a tight grip on a terrified young kitchen boy he was using as a human shield. “You should have stayed in bed and died quietly! Now I’m taking the accounts, the routes, and Grayhaven House!”
Damian stepped out onto the helipad, shielding Lila behind his right leg while keeping his left arm free. He handed me the spare pistol with a look of absolute, chilling calm. “Hold her tight, Elena. Cover her ears.”
I pressed Lila’s face into my shoulder, covering her ears with my hands as the wind howled around us.
“You always were a coward, Marcus,” Damian’s voice carried effortlessly over the deafening roar of the chopper blades, laced with a lethal, hypnotic calm. “You hide behind boys, you poison wine like a coward in the night, and you think a few hired guns make you a king.”
“I have the numbers, Damian!” Marcus snarled, pressing the barrel of his gun against the trembling kitchen boy’s temple. “One twitch and this kid’s brains are all over the tarmac!”
Lila, peeking past my shoulder despite my efforts, felt the chaotic, jagged vibrations of Marcus’s panic. She looked up at Damian, her eyes wide, and made a single, subtle sign with her tiny hand: Now.
Damian didn't blink.
In a movement so fast it defied human reaction, he didn't aim at Marcus—he fired a single, calculated shot straight into the helicopter’s hydraulic fuel line just behind Marcus’s left foot.
HSSSS—
A jet of high-pressure aviation fuel sprayed across the hot engine manifold, instantly igniting into a blinding wall of roaring orange flame.
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Marcus shrieked in terror, releasing the kitchen boy and stumbling backward as the chopper’s turbine whined and sputtered into a catastrophic stall. The boy scrambled forward on hands and knees, and Victor—who had just emerged from the stairwell with reinforcements—grabbed him and dragged him back to safety.
Marcus tried to raise his weapon, but Damian closed the distance in two strides. With a brutal, bone-crushing right hook, Damian sent Marcus flying across the wet concrete. Marcus slid across the helipad, his gun skittering over the edge into the dark abyss of the stormy Baltimore night below.
