My ten-year-old son complained about a simple stomachache. At first, I assumed it was a minor illness, something every parent deals with. But weeks later, I found myself sitting in a hospital examination room as a doctor stared at an ultrasound screen, then looked at me with visible concern and asked a question that instantly filled me with dread: “Ma’am... is his father here?” What he saw on that scan would change everything we thought we knew.

“Get down!” Mark screamed, tackling me and Elena to the wooden floorboards as tactical flashlight beams cut through the suffocating tear gas.

Dr. Vance didn't duck.

He grabbed his shotgun off the table, racked the slide, and fired a deafening shot through the smoke toward the doorway. The blast shattered the doorframe, forcing the first tactical operative to dive back onto the porch for cover.

“Run!” Vance roared, grabbing the silver hard drive and thrusting it into my coat pocket. “There’s a root cellar door under the kitchen rug! It leads to the ravine behind the cabin! Get the evidence to the federal prosecutor!”

“We’re not leaving you!” I cried, coughing violently as the tear gas burned my eyes and throat.

“They don't want me alive anyway, Sarah!” Vance shouted, racking another shell into his shotgun. “Save your boy!”

Mark grabbed my arm, dragging me toward the kitchen. He kicked aside a braided wool rug, exposing a heavy wooden trapdoor in the floorboards. Mark yanked it open, revealing a dark, wooden ladder leading down into a cool, earth-scented tunnel.

“Elena, go first!” Mark ordered.

Elena scrambled down the ladder into the darkness. I followed right behind her, my hands clutching the silver hard drive inside my coat pocket like it was my son’s very life.

Above us, gunshots echoed through the cabin floorboards—sharp, terrifying cracks that rattled the foundation of the house. Vance’s shotgun roared once more, followed by a heavy thud, and then... absolute, chilling silence.

“Mark!” I screamed up the ladder hatch.

Mark dropped into the tunnel beside me, slamming the heavy wooden trapdoor shut and sliding an iron bolt into place. Tears were running down his soot-stained face.

“Move!” Mark choked out. “We have to move!”

We scrambled through the narrow, muddy dirt tunnel on our hands and knees for fifty yards until we hit a rusted iron grate covered in dead leaves. Mark threw his shoulder against the grate, bursting out into the cool, damp night air of a deep wooded ravine behind the cabin.

Behind us, up on the hill, high orange flames were already licking through the roof of Vance’s cabin. Apex’s mercenaries were burning the house to destroy every trace of the ledgers.

Sirens wailed in the distance. Real sirens.

Detective Miller and the Wisconsin State Patrol—alerted by Elena’s pre-programmed emergency location beacon—were tearing up the logging road with flashing red and blue lights.