The armored Mercedes G-Wagon roared through the blinding whiteout on Interstate 94, its heavy winter tires gripping the slush at ninety miles per hour. Victor leaned over the steering wheel, his knuckles bleeding from the sheer intensity of his grip. Beside him, Dr. Aaron monitored the failing portable battery packs that supplied power to the backup oxygen tanks.
“Ten minutes, Victor,” Aaron shouted over the howling engine and the screaming blizzard wipers. “Leo and Mia cannot survive in ambient cold air for more than forty minutes, even inside insulated travel warmers. If their core temperature drops below ninety-four degrees, their lungs will collapse.”
Victor didn’t reply. He pressed the accelerator flat against the floorboards.
Two miles north of the Skokie exit, emergency flares flickered through the sheet of falling snow. A black Suburban lay flipped onto its side against a concrete guardrail, its windows shattered and hazard lights blinking erratically into the storm. Two dark sedans were parked diagonally across the lanes, completely boxing it in.
Victor didn’t touch the brakes.
He steered directly into the rear quarter-panel of the lead sedan, slamming into it with three tons of steel and shattering the vehicle across the icy median. Gunfire erupted instantly through the blizzard, bullets ricocheting off the Mercedes’ reinforced ballistic windshield with deafening cracks.
Victor kicked his door open before the SUV had even come to a full stop. Moving with lethal, military precision, he raised his weapon and fired three controlled double-taps through the swirling snow, neutralizing the two armed mercenaries who were attempting to breach the overturned Suburban’s rear hatch.
“Julian!” Victor roared, sprinting across the ice, ignoring the biting wind that tore through his coat.
A groaning voice answered from the shattered front seat. Julian kicked out the cracked windshield, his face covered in blood and his shoulder visibly dislocated. “Victor… in the back… Elena locked herself in the secure vault compartment. She wouldn’t open it. She thought you sent these men.”
Victor dropped to his knees in the snow, tearing the distorted rear door open with raw, desperate strength.
Inside the crushed trunk space, huddled inside an armored steel transport cage, sat Elena.
She was shivering uncontrollably, her designer coat wrapped tightly around both babies who were strapped against her bare chest to share her body heat. Her fingers were blue. Her lips were cracked and trembling. In her right hand, she gripped a small utility knife, her tear-stained eyes wild with the ferocious, cornered instinct of a mother prepared to die for her children.
“Stay away from them!” she screamed, her voice breaking against the howling wind. “Stay away from my babies, Victor! You poisoned them! You let that woman destroy us!”
“Elena, look at me!” Victor dropped his weapon into the snow and raised his bare, trembling hands. He fell to his knees in the icy slush, tears spilling freely down his frozen cheeks. “Look at me, please. I didn’t touch the codes. I didn’t touch their medicine. Sophia Vance framed me to force a buyout of her father’s cartel. I spent tonight cutting her throat financially so she could never come near our family again.”
Elena stared at him through the gloom, her chest heaving as she listened to the frantic beeping of the twin baby monitors strapped beneath her coat. Mia’s monitor let out a long, shrill, continuous warning tone.
“She’s flatlining, Elena!” Dr. Aaron cried out, sliding into the wreckage with a portable heating pad and emergency epinephrine. “Let me take them! Please, Elena, let me save them!”
Elena looked from the desperate doctor to Victor, seeing the shattered, terrified man beneath the ruthless Chicago mogul’s facade for the very first time in their marriage. The cold facade was gone; only a father’s raw agony remained. She broke down, collapsing forward into Victor’s open arms as he caught her, pulling her and the tiny bundles out of the freezing wreckage and into the heated cabin of his SUV.
Aaron worked frantically in the backseat, pumping concentrated warmth and stabilized oxygen into the tiny infants’ lungs. For two agonizing minutes, the only sound inside the vehicle was the whistling blizzard and Elena’s quiet, desperate prayers against Victor’s soaked shoulder.
Then, a tiny, raspy cry pierced the air. Then another.
Mia’s monitor chirped back into a steady, normal rhythm. Leo moved his small, translucent fingers, his chest rising and falling evenly against the medical warming pad.
Victor wrapped his coat around his wife and children, shielding them with his own body as the convoy of his security team finally arrived, surrounding them in an impenetrable wall of flashing red lights and steel.
Elena buried her face into the crook of Victor’s neck, finally smelling the bitter metallic tang of adrenaline, gun smoke, and melting snow beneath the faint scent of perfume that had nearly torn their lives apart.
“It’s over,” Victor whispered into her hair, holding his entire world safe against his chest as the ambulance doors opened. “Nobody will ever touch you again.”
