The maid secretly helped my paralyzed daughter take her first steps while the rest of my family had already given up on her. Hours later, they accused that same woman of stealing a priceless necklace—but the hidden camera in my daughters’ room had recorded far more than anyone realized.

The suppressed shot from my rifle sounded like a sharp whip-crack in the fog.

Vance’s lead mercenary dropped to the stone pier before he even heard the noise, his weapon clattering into the ocean water below.

"SNIPER!" Vance screamed, vaulting over the hood of the Mercedes as high-caliber fire rained down from the shadow of the crane.

"Alpha, move in!" Marco roared through the radio network.

From behind the high walls of the stacked shipping containers, two heavy armored transport trucks surged forward, their high-beam headlights blinding Vance’s remaining five mercenaries. Heavy automatic fire erupted from both sides of the pier, bright red tracer rounds cutting through the salt fog like searing laser beams.

Vance’s men fought like cornered rats. They threw smoke canisters onto the concrete, firing blind bursts from their submachine guns into the blinding white fog.

Two of Vance’s mercenaries charged toward the water’s edge, trying to reach the rubber zodiac boat to escape back into the open sea.

I adjusted my thermal scope, tracking their heat signatures through the thick smoke cloud.

Crack. Crack.

Both men hit the water with heavy splashes, their black forms disappearing beneath the dark, icy waves of Marseilles harbor.

Below me, Vance was sprinting through a narrow three-foot gap between two red shipping containers, heading toward the abandoned port warehouse at the edge of Pier 14. He was fast, moving with the desperate agility of a man who knew that capture meant a fate far worse than death.

"He’s breaching the north warehouse!" Marco yelled over the radio, the sound of heavy gunfire echoing behind him. "We have three shooters holding the main entrance!"

"Hold the perimeter!" I commanded into my microphone, dropping my rifle onto its sling. "Don't let him get to the street! He’s mine!"

I hooked my tactical carabiner onto the crane’s steel descent cable, unlatched the safety brake, and stepped off the iron ledge eighty feet above the dock.

The wind roared in my ears as I slid down the steel line in a blinding two-second drop, hitting the wet concrete floor of Pier 14 in a low roll, drawing my custom twin Beretta pistols from their shoulder holsters as I came to my feet.

The metal door of the north warehouse hung open, swinging back and forth in the sea breeze with a rhythmic, screeching groan.

Inside, the warehouse was pitch black, smelling of damp cotton, machine oil, and old timber. High wooden crates were stacked twenty feet high, creating a shadowed canyon of narrow walkways.

I stepped through the threshold, my night-vision goggles rendering the dark room in crisp, terrifying shades of neon green and shadow.

"Julian," I called out, my voice bouncing off the high corrugated iron roof. "You ran out of old women to buy."

Silence.

Then, from forty yards deep inside the dark maze of wooden crates, came the sound of a heavy iron bolt being racked into a shotgun chamber.

"You should have stayed in Tuscany, Adrian!" Vance’s voice echoed from three directions at once, distorted by the metal walls. "You think you're a big man because you inherited a shipping line? Your father was a weak fool! Your mother was a greedy whore! And your wife died begging me for her life on a dirt road in Amalfi!"

My jaw tightened so hard I felt my teeth grind together.

"She didn't beg, Julian," I said, moving soundlessly through the green-tinted shadows, my twin pistols held at low ready. "I read the police forensics report. She fought you until the car went over the cliff."

"And your little girl?" Vance taunted, his footsteps echoing softly on the wooden floorboards to my left. "The little crippled one? Is she still sitting in her little blue chair watching the world pass her by?"

I stopped beside a massive wooden shipping crate.