Chapter 4 - The Ruin of Black Pine
At 4:15 AM, the heavy wooden main gates of the Black Pine estate were blown completely off their hinges by a high-explosive breaching charge.
A convoy of four heavy steel snow-plows and black armored trucks roared up the buried driveway, their blinding LED headlights cutting through the swirling snow.
The lead truck slammed to a halt in front of the steps. The door flew open, and Damian Voss leaped out into the storm. He wasn't wearing his suit jacket or his expensive coat—just a white shirt soaked in sweat, his eyes bloodshot, wild, and crazed with a terror he had never known in his thirty-five years of life.
He had abandoned his jet in Denver, bribed a state road crew a hundred thousand dollars to clear the pass illegally, and driven like a madman up a mountain that was actively collapsing under a avalanche warning.
"Break the front door down!" Damian screamed at his men. "NOW!"
Before his security team could set the charges, the massive iron-bound door unlocked from the inside and slowly creaked open.
Margaret Farrell stood in the doorway.
She was holding a hurricane lamp in one trembling hand. Her apron was covered in dark, dried blood. Her face was aged ten years, her eyes hollow, dead, and cold.
Damian froze on the snow-covered steps, his heart stopping in his chest as he saw the blood on Margaret’s apron.
"Margaret..." Damian’s voice cracked, coming out as a pathetic, strangled gasp. "Where is she? Where is my wife?"
Margaret didn't bow her head. She didn't offer the respect she had shown him for ten years as the head of the house. She looked at the billionaire mafia lord as if he were a piece of filth scraped from the bottom of her shoe.
"She is gone, Mr. Voss," Margaret said flatly.
Damian felt the ground tilt beneath his feet. The world went completely black at the edges. "What... what did you say?"
"She went into premature labor four hours ago," Margaret continued, her voice devoid of any emotion, echoing like a funeral bell in the freezing air. "No power. No heat. No doctor. She bled out on your bed, holding the daughter she delivered alone in the cold."
"NO!" Damian let out a gut-wrenching, animalistic roar that tore his throat. He shoved past Margaret, sprinting through the dark, icy foyer, his boots skidding across the hardwood floor.
He took the grand staircase three steps at a time, screaming her name into the empty, pitch-black corridors.
"ELENA! ELENA!"
He threw open the doors to the master bedroom.
The room was freezing. The candles had burned down to pools of wax. On the grand bed lay an indentation in the mattress, covered in dark, frozen blood.
The bed was empty.
Damian collapsed to his knees beside the bed, his hands grasping the blood-stained sheets, pulling them to his face as he let out a shattered, sobbing wail that echoed through the empty stone halls of Black Pine.
For fifteen minutes, the billionaire crime lord wept like a broken child on the floor of the room where he had left his wife to die.
Marcus Vance, his head of security, stepped quietly into the bedroom, holding a satellite tablet.
"Boss..." Marcus whispered hesitantly. "Boss, you need to see this."
Damian didn't move. "Get out."
"Sir! It's about Mrs. Voss!"
Damian’s head snapped up, his bloodshot eyes locking onto Marcus with terrifying speed. "What?"
"A private search-and-rescue snow-cat breached the south perimeter forty minutes before we arrived," Marcus reported rapidly. "It was sent by Dr. Julian Thorne—your wife’s former medical director from Chicago. They extracted Mrs. Voss and the newborn. They airlifted them out via a military transport from the private airfield down in the valley."
Damian stood up slowly, his body shaking with a dangerous, unstable mix of grief and sudden, desperate hope. "She’s alive?"
"She had a faint pulse when they loaded her into the transport, sir. But... Dr. Thorne left a message with the valley air-traffic tower."
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"What message?" Damian demanded, grabbing Marcus by his collar.
Marcus swallowed hard. "He said... Tell Damian Voss that as far as the world, the law, and his family are concerned, Elena and Klara Voss died on this mountain tonight. If he ever tries to find them, we will release the complete video logs of what he did to the Federal Board."
