The solid brass latch of the nursery door did not merely close; it locked with a definitive, mechanical finality that reverberated through the marrow of my bones.

"Are you okay?" I asked, rushing over to Hunter and checking her over.

"I'm fine. Is Leo okay?" she breathed, holding the baby tightly against her chest.

"He's safe," I said, grabbing the fallen mercenary's HK416 rifle and checking the magazine. Fully loaded. "Lock this door behind me. Do not open it for anyone except me or Prescott's corpse."

"Lorenzo, wait," Hunter grabbed my sleeve, her hazel eyes filled with desperate warning. "Halloran has an entire extraction team downstairs. You can't take them all by yourself."

"Watch me," I said, kissing the top of Leo's blanket and giving Hunter a firm nod before stepping out into the smoke-filled hallway.

The east wing corridor was deserted, save for the groaning mercenary clutching his shoulder on the floor. I ignored him, breaking into a fast, tactical jog toward the grand central staircase.

As I descended to the second floor, the sounds of chaos drifted up from the grand foyer below. Shouting. Alarms. The shattering of glass.

Someone else was inside the house.

I leaned over the wrought-iron balcony overlooking the two-story foyer and looked down.

Dr. Julian Halloran was standing near the front entrance, clutching a heavy metal briefcase, surrounded by four armed operatives in civilian tactical gear. But they weren't fighting my security detail—they were fighting each other.

A second group of armed men, wearing tactical vests bearing the insignia of the federal Marshals Service mixed with private black-ops insignia, had breached the front doors.

At the front of the federal team stood Marcus Webb, my old law-school friend turned federal prosecutor, holding a Sig Sauer carbine and shouting orders.

"Federal agents! Drop your weapons!" Marcus roared, firing a warning shot that starred the marble floor inches from Halloran's Italian leather shoes.

Halloran panicked, shoving the briefcase into the arms of his lead operative. "Get me to the chopper on the pad! Now!"

"Dr. Halloran!" I shouted, stepping out onto the grand staircase, raising my rifle and sighting dead center on his chest. "End of the line, Julian."

Halloran froze, looking up at me with absolute disbelief. "Rossi? How... how are you out of the nursery? The gas—"

"The gas wasn't strong enough to kill a cockro, Julian," I said, descending the stairs step by step, each movement deliberate and terrifyingly calm. "Just like your little poison scheme wasn't strong enough to kill my son."

Halloran's face twisted into a mask of frantic desperation. He reached inside his coat, his hand wrapping around a small black detonator switch. "Stay back, Rossi! One press and every digital record linking my pharmaceutical shell company to your estate's water system gets wiped from the cloud! You'll never prove a damn thing!"

"I don't need digital records," a calm, clear voice echoed from the front doors.

Marcus Webb lowered his carbine slightly as a slender woman in a federal investigator's windbreaker stepped past him into the foyer, holding a bulky encrypted data-pad.

Agent Sarah Lin of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Corporate Fraud and Bio-Security Division.

"We didn't need your cloud servers, Dr. Halloran," Agent Lin said, stepping into the light of the grand chandelier. "We tapped into your private offshore research accounts three days ago when an anonymous whistleblower uploaded the complete experimental logs from your Geneva facility."

Halloran's jaw dropped. He stared at Agent Lin, then looked back up at me.

"An anonymous whistleblower," Halloran whispered, realization dawning in his terrified eyes. "Clara... Clara Vance."

"Not Clara," I said, stopping halfway down the stairs, keeping my rifle leveled at his heart. "Hunter Higgins."

Before Halloran could react, Marcus Webb lunged forward, tackling the doctor to the marble floor and slamming steel handcuffs around his wrists with a satisfying click.

The remaining mercenaries dropped their weapons, realizing the game was over. Federal agents swarmed the foyer, securing the perimeter and zip-tying Halloran's operatives.

Marcus stood up, dusting off his jacket, and looked up at me with a wry, exhausted grin.

"Took you long enough to answer my phone calls, Lorenzo," Marcus called out. "We've been building this RICO case against Halloran's syndicate for six months. We just needed you to draw them out into the open."