Chapter 4 - The Cellar Protocol"Thermal smoke!" Lucas yelled, pulling Clara and the boys up. "They’re breaching from the gardens!"
"Lucas, hand the children to my security team!" Eleanor ordered, her voice cutting through the smoke. "We will contain this quietly!"
"If your team touches them, they’ll end up in a body bag!" Clara screamed back, pulling a small 9mm pistol from her medical bag and racking the slide with practiced, terrifying precision.
Lucas didn't argue. He grabbed a heavy iron fire poker from the hearth, caught Liam by the shoulder, and guided the family down the narrow service corridor toward the West Wing.
"Where are we going?" Clara panted, carrying Noah while keeping up with Lucas’s long strides.
"The estate’s old wine cellar," Lucas said, his mind mapping the blueprint of the house he grew up in. "It was reinforced as a fallout shelter during the Cold War. Three-foot-thick reinforced concrete. The door is steel."
They burst through the kitchen doors, leaving behind the sound of yelling and heavy tactical boots stomping through the grand ballroom.
They reached the heavy vault door hidden behind the oak paneling of the pantry. Lucas punched a six-digit code into the mechanical dial—his childhood birthday, a code his father had set thirty years ago.
The heavy iron bolts retracted with a deep, hydraulic groan.
Lucas shoved Clara and the four boys inside. "Get to the back corner. Don't make a sound."
"Lucas, wait!" Clara caught his wrist as he turned to step back out. Her fingers were ice-cold, covered in dust and dried blood. "You can't fight them alone. Marcus Caldwell is leading them."
Lucas froze. The name hit him like a physical blow. "Marcus? He was my squad leader in Fallujah."
"He works for Julian now," Clara said, her eyes dark with warning. "He’s the one who burned my clinic in Berlin. He doesn't want the boys alive, Lucas. He has a contract to erase every piece of biological data."
Lucas looked down at Clara’s hand on his wrist, then past her into the dim yellow light of the fallout shelter.
The four boys were sitting quietly on a wooden crate. Liam, the eldest, was holding a small silver pocket knife he had pulled from his sweater, his small jaw set in a hard, rigid line.
They look like little soldiers, Lucas realized with a pang of deep, agonizing sorrow. Because they’ve been hunted their entire lives.
"I’m not fighting them alone," Lucas said softly, reaching up to gently touch Clara’s cheek, feeling the warm, familiar softness of her skin after six years of ghost-filled dreams. "I’m fighting for my family."
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He pulled the heavy vault door shut, turning the iron wheel until the deadbolts locked into place from the outside.
Then, he turned around in the dark corridor, raised the iron poker in one hand, pulled his service weapon from his shoulder holster with the other, and waited for his old squad leader to come down the stairs.
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