Chapter 11 - The Devil's Marksmanship
The inside of the Mustang smelled like rain, exhaust, and the sharp, metallic tang of Victoria’s blood.
Cole stared at Elena through the rearview mirror. For a split second, he hesitated. The girl sitting in the back seat wasn't a trained killer; she was a bride whose life had been detonated exactly two hours ago. But the look in her eyes—cold, hard, and terrifyingly focused—was identical to the ruthless gaze of the billionaire bleeding out on her lap.
Without a word, Cole flipped the Glock backward and handed it between the front seats.
Elena grabbed the heavy, matte-black weapon. It felt alien in her hands, cold and lethal. She didn't know the first thing about firearms, but she knew the physics of a moving vehicle.
“Julian, keep the wheel steady!” Elena screamed over the roaring wind.
She crawled over Victoria’s slumping body, ignoring the glass biting into her knees, and shoved her upper half out of the shattered rear window. The freezing rain whipped across her face, stinging her eyes, but she forced them open.
Fifty yards back, the headlights of the two pursuing SUVs cut through the storm, closing the distance fast. A man was leaning out of the passenger side of the lead vehicle, raising an automatic rifle.
Elena didn’t aim for the man. The target was too small, the car bouncing too violently.
She aimed low. She aimed for the tires.
Elena braced her arms against the jagged window frame, lined up the sights with the front right headlight of the lead SUV, and pulled the trigger.
The recoil slammed into her shoulder, jarring her teeth, but she didn’t stop. She pulled the trigger again. And again. Crack. Crack. Crack.
The third bullet found its mark. It didn’t hit the tire—it punched straight through the SUV’s radiator and into the engine block. A massive plume of white steam erupted from the grill, blinding the driver instantly. The massive, two-ton vehicle swerved wildly to the right, its tires screeching against the wet asphalt.
It clipped the concrete median, flipped spectacularly into the air, and crashed down on its side in a shower of sparks and shattered glass.
The second SUV had no time to brake. It slammed directly into the undercarriage of the flipped vehicle with a deafening crunch of metal. Both vehicles became a tangled, smoking roadblock of twisted steel.
Elena fell back into the seat, gasping for air, dropping the empty gun onto the floorboards.
“Holy hell,” Cole breathed, staring at the carnage in the rearview mirror. “You actually did it.”
“Drive!” Elena screamed, pressing the bloody sleeve back against Victoria’s stomach. “Just drive!”
Ten agonizing minutes later, Cole directed Julian into the rusted loading dock of an abandoned meatpacking plant on the outskirts of the city. They skidded to a halt in front of a heavy steel door.
Cole practically kicked his door open. He pounded a frantic rhythm on the steel: Three rapid knocks, a pause, two more.
The door slid open, revealing a man in his late fifties with a greying ponytail, wearing a blood-stained leather apron over surgical scrubs.
“Vance!” Cole yelled, already running to the back of the Mustang. “I need a trauma table! Gunshot wound to the abdomen!”
Vance took one look at the Maybach-quality silk of Victoria’s ruined suit and whistled sharply. “You brought a billionaire to a butcher shop, Cole. Bold move.”
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“Save her,” Elena snarled, her voice dropping into a deadly register as she helped drag Victoria’s limp body from the car. “Or I swear I will make you wish Arthur Sterling got to you first.”
Vance raised an eyebrow, a grim smirk playing on his lips. “Feisty. Put her on the gurney. Let’s see if her money can buy her a pulse.”
