Part 5: Race Through the Chicago Night
The underground parking garage of Lakeshore Medical Center was vast, concrete, and dimly lit, echoing with the distant hum of ventilation pipes and the frantic click of our shoes against the pavement. Row after row of parked cars stretched into the shadows, and my heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird.
“Ava!” I screamed, my voice bouncing off the concrete walls. “Ava!”
“Keep your voice down, look for tire tracks or idling engines,” Ethan commanded, his eyes scanning the gloom with the hyper-focused precision of a seasoned predator. His gun was held low, disciplined, ready. The sight of it sent a shudder through me—this was the reality of the man I had married, a world I had desperately tried to escape, now violently colliding with the most precious thing in my life.
Suddenly, the sharp squeal of tires echoed from the far corner of sector C, near the exit ramp.
“There!” Ethan barked.
A black sleek sedan was accelerating rapidly toward the security barrier, its tires leaving dark skid marks on the concrete. Through the tinted rear window, a flash of bright purple caught my eye.
“Ava!” I shrieked, sprinting toward the moving vehicle regardless of the danger.
“Maya, stop!” Ethan yelled, grabbing my waist and hauling me back just as the sedan smashed through the parking gate’s wooden arm, sending splintered wood flying into the air before shooting out onto the street.
I stumbled against Ethan’s chest, breathless and sobbing. “They have her! They have my baby!”
Ethan didn’t panic. His face was a mask of cold, terrifying granite. He pulled his encrypted satellite phone from his pocket with one hand while pulling me toward his own vehicle—a black armored Mercedes parked near the staff entrance.
“Get in the car, Maya,” he ordered, unlocking the doors with a sharp beep.
“Where are you going? We need to call the police!”
“The police in this city take twenty minutes to respond to a downtown shooting; by then, my mother will have smuggled her across state lines,” Ethan said, ripping open the driver's side door. He shoved me into the passenger seat, slammed it shut, and slid behind the wheel. The engine roared to life with a deep, guttural growl of twin-turbocharged horsepower. “Buckle up.”
“Ethan, you can’t just go rogue! This is a kidnapping!”
“This is war,” he corrected coldly, his tires spinning violently against the concrete as he threw the car into reverse, whipped around a concrete pillar, and tore out of the garage into the Chicago evening traffic.
The Mercedes surged forward like a missile. Ethan drove with terrifying, calculated precision, weaving through crowded lanes of evening commuters, cutting off delivery trucks, and running red lights with the expertise of a man who had spent a lifetime evading rival syndicates.
“Where are they going?” I asked, gripping the leather handle above the door so hard my knuckles turned white.
“There is only one safehouse my mother uses when she’s cornered—an old waterfront warehouse down by the South Chicago docks,” Ethan said, his eyes locked on the road ahead, his fingers drumming a rhythmic, lethal tattoo against the steering wheel. “She thinks she can hide out there and dictate terms to me. She has no idea what happens when you touch a wolf's cub.”
As the towering skyscrapers of downtown Chicago gave way to the industrial rust and decaying brick warehouses of the southern harbor, the tension inside the car grew suffocating. The sky above Lake Michigan turned a bruised, stormy purple, mirroring the dark fury boiling inside both of us.
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“If my daughter has even a single scratch on her—” I began, my voice trembling with rage.
“She won't,” Ethan interrupted, his voice dropping into a register so dark and absolute it sent a chill straight down my spine. “Because before my mother lays another finger on Ava, I will burn that warehouse to the ground with her inside it.”
