Chapter 16 - The Trap Snaps
Emma didn't panic. Her heart rate remained steady, her mind calculating the distances, the exits, the vulnerabilities.
"You can't kill me here, Julian," Emma said, her voice echoing slightly in the small room. "This is a public bank. There are cameras, records of my entry."
"The cameras are experiencing a convenient system malfunction," Julian smiled, stepping closer. "And as for your entry? You never arrived. The logs will show you canceled your appointment. You’ll simply disappear into the New York night—another tragic casualty of a woman running from her past."
One of the large men stepped forward, reaching for the leather ledger in Emma’s hand.
Emma acted on pure reflex. She slammed the heavy ledger into the man’s face, the sharp corner striking his nose with a sickening crunch. As he stumbled back, she grabbed the heavy brass chair from the viewing table and swung it into the shins of the second guard.
Julian gasped, stepping back out of the room. "Get her!" he screamed.
Emma didn't try to fight her way through the main vault door. She knew the layout of these old banks; they always had an emergency fire exit that led to the subway maintenance tunnels beneath 5th Avenue. She dashed past the groaning guards, sprinting down the narrow corridor of safety deposit boxes.
She found the heavy red door marked Emergency Exit. She threw her weight against the panic bar. An alarm wailed—a piercing, deafening sound that Julian hadn't been able to disable.
She plunged into the dark, damp concrete stairs, her boots echoing as she flew down into the bowels of the city. Behind her, she heard the heavy footsteps of Julian’s men recovering and giving chase.
She reached the bottom of the stairs, bursting through a rusted door into the active subway tunnels. The air smelled of grease and electricity. A hundred yards away, she could see the bright lights of a subway platform and hear the roar of an approaching train.
She ran along the narrow maintenance walkway, her fingers gripping the ledger and the flash drive against her chest.
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"Stop!" a voice shouted from behind. A gunshot echoed through the tunnel, the bullet chipping the concrete inches above Emma’s head, showering her hair with sparks and dust.
She didn't stop. She reached the end of the platform just as the train pulled in. She leaped over the safety barrier, tumbling onto the crowded platform just as the doors opened. She scrambled into the car, disappearing into the crowd of commuters as the doors slid shut, leaving Julian’s guards stranded on the platform, cursing into their radios.
