The doctors gave my three-year-old son just fourteen days to live, and I believed nothing could hurt me more than that

Julian let out an ear-splitting shriek of agony as the steel blade pinned his flesh to the vault frame. His revolver clattered to the floor. His left hand scrambled frantically to pull the knife out, but his blood rendered his grip useless.

I dragged myself up from the concrete, marched across the bloody floor, and grabbed Julian by the hair, slamming his face hard against the titanium vault door.

"The code, Julian," I growled, my voice sounding like grinding stones. "Type the code with your left hand, or I swear to God I will cut your arm off at the elbow and use your dead eye on the scanner."

"Fuck you, Luca!" Julian screamed, blood pouring down his nose. "Kill me! Kill me and watch your boy rot!"

I grabbed his left index finger, bent it backward until a sickening SNAP echoed through the vault area, and twisted it forty-five degrees.

Julian let out a high-pitched, guttural scream, his knees buckling under the sheer intensity of the pain. "STOP! STOP! OKAY! OKAY! I'LL OPEN IT! I'LL OPEN IT!"

With his trembling, broken left hand, Julian reached for the hardware token on his watch, pressed the biometric authentication button, and read the sixteen-digit daily code generated on the tiny LED screen.

I forced his head forward, holding his right eye wide open against the biometric retinal scanner.

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

The digital camera scanned his iris. A green light flashed on the console.

RETINAL SCAN VERIFIED.

I grabbed his left hand and smashed his thumb against the keypad, typing in the sixteen-digit master code he blurted out between agonizing sobs.

CODE ACCEPTED. THERMITE DEMOLITION DISARMED.

With a deep, pneumatic hiss that sounded like sweet music to my ears, the massive six-ton titanium vault door unlatched and swung slowly outward.

Inside the freezing, fog-filled vault, sitting inside a pristine stainless-steel cryo-preservation chamber, was a single glass vial filled with a brilliant glowing blue liquid—the Rhodesian Glycoside Neutralizing Enzyme.

I reached inside, gathered the cryo-container gently into my hands as if it were fragile glass, and secured it inside my padded leather jacket.

I turned back to Julian, who was slumping against the vault frame, weeping, clutching his broken hand.

The gunfire in the warehouse had ceased. Captain Lin and my loyal soldiers stepped through the settling smoke, weapons held at the ready. All of Julian’s enforcers were either dead or lying in handcuffs on the concrete.

Captain Lin stepped up beside me, looking at the crying, bloody man pinned to the vault door.

"Is this him?" Lin asked.

"He's all yours, Captain," I said, pulling Sofia's blade free from the door with a sharp tug. Julian collapsed into a heap on the floor, groaning in pain as state troopers moved in to cuff him. "He's facing life without parole for conspiracy to murder, illegal possession of class-A chemical weapons, and high treason under syndicate law."