The taxi’s engine whined as it wove recklessly through the dense mid-afternoon traffic, tires screeching against the asphalt. Elena couldn’t pull her gaze away from the child sitting beside her on the worn vinyl seat. The boy’s smile stretched wider, unnatural and hollow, mirroring a predator that had finally shed its disguise.
«Who are you?» Elena whispered, the phone still pressed tightly against her ear where the real Leo’s terrified sobs continued to ring out.
The boy didn’t answer. Instead, his small hands reached into the pocket of his yellow polo shirt and pulled out a standard metal detonator with a single blinking green light. Without breaking eye contact, his features began to shift—a subtle, terrifying rippling of skin. The silicone mask peeled away from his jawline with a soft, tearing sound, revealing the sharp, scarred features of an older teenage boy who had been trained for this exact infiltration.
«The global liquidation protocol doesn’t wait for hostages, Elena,» the imposter rasped, his voice dropping into an unnatural adult register. His thumb hovered inches above the red button.
Elena threw herself across the back seat, using her body to shield the gap between them just as the taxi swerved violently off the main boulevard and slammed to a halt in a secluded, concrete-walled loading dock. The driver’s door flew open. Before Elena could kick at the back door handle, a gloved hand ripped it open from the outside.
It wasn’t Marcus Vance. It was Julian, his clothes soaked through with seawater, his expression a mask of cold fury as he grabbed the fake boy by the collar and dragged him out onto the concrete.
«You’re late, brother,» Julian snarled, pressing his boot directly onto the throat of the teenager who had posed as Leo.
Elena scrambled out the opposite door, gasping for breath as she scanned the shadowed perimeter of the dock. There was no sign of Marcus, no sign of Arthur, and no sign of her real son. Julian slowly turned his head to look at her, a blood-soaked handkerchief wrapped tightly around his left palm.
«If you want to see your real son alive,» Julian said, tossing a heavy, encrypted satellite receiver at her feet, «you’re going to unlock the server in Lake Como yourself. Right now.»
Before Elena could answer, the screen on the satellite receiver lit up automatically, projecting a live video feed onto the concrete wall of the loading dock. It showed five-year-old Leo tied to a straight-backed chair inside a dimly lit, high-tech control room. Standing directly behind him with a sharp surgical blade pressed to the boy’s cheek was a woman Elena thought she had buried three years ago—her own mother.