Chapter 174. The Unexpected Attack

The new understanding was a delicate, living thing. They nurtured it through small, deliberate acts. A hand rested on a shoulder during a call. A coffee made without asking. A shared glance across the room that held the weight of Jessica’s words: the only real thing. It wasn’t easy. Sabatine’s instincts still screamed to fortify, to distance, but he’d rerouted them. His vigilance was no longer a wall between them, but a perimeter around them both.

They decided, cautiously, to re-enter the world. Not with a fanfare, but with purpose. Anton needed to be seen at the helm of his recovering company. A low-key, tightly controlled return to the Rogers Industries tower was scheduled. Not a board meeting, but a series of small, secure briefings with department heads. A show of stability.

The plan was meticulous. Leon had the route locked down—a pre-dawn departure from Shoreditch, a three-car convoy with alternating routes, full counter-surveillance sweeps. The penthouse felt like a cocoon they were reluctantly leaving.

The morning was cold and clear, a brittle blue sky over the city’s skeleton. Sabatine stood by the penthouse door, performing a final weapons check with a calm that was only partly feigned. Anton watched him, already in his overcoat, his expression unreadable.

“It’s a show of strength,” Anton said, as if convincing himself. “We walk in, we project control, we leave. Two hours.”

“Two hours,” Sabatine confirmed, holstering his pistol. He met Anton’s eyes. “Stay close to Leon inside. I’ll be in your immediate detail.”

A ghost of a smile touched Anton’s lips. “I always am.”

The drive was tense but uneventful. The city was just waking up, delivery trucks and early shift workers blurring past the tinted windows. They took the service entrance into the Rogers Industries building, bypassing the grand, scarred main lobby which was still under repair from the earlier protests. The silence inside was profound, the usual hum of a thousand employees replaced by the echo of their footsteps in marble corridors. A skeleton staff of pre-vetted security and a few essential personnel were the only souls present.

The briefings were held in a mid-level conference room with no external windows. Anton was magnetic, his focus absolute, his commands clear as he addressed the shell-shocked heads of R&D, Legal, and Global Operations. He spoke of resilience, of forensic audits, of a new era of transparency and fortified ethics. He was rebuilding the myth, and they were hungry for it.

Sabatine stood by the door, his gaze sweeping the room, the corridors visible through the glass wall. He watched Anton, seeing the CEO in his element, and felt that new, protective pang. This is what he protects, he thought. Not just the man, but the leader, the vision, the thousands of jobs that depended on his steadiness.

They were forty minutes into the second briefing when Sabatine felt it. Not a sound, not a sight. A shift in pressure. The faintest vibration through the soles of his shoes, transmitted through the building’s steel bones. It was a sensation he knew from war zones—the deep, sub-auditory thump of a significant detonation, seconds before the sound arrived.

His head snapped towards the bank of internal security monitors Leon had set up on a side table. The feed from the building’s main entrance showed nothing. Then the feed from the north-side loading dock flickered and died.

“Down!” Sabatine roared, his voice cutting through Anton’s sentence.

He didn’t think so. He moved. He was across the room in three strides, his body a battering ram colliding with Anton, driving him sideways off the chair and onto the floor behind the solid oak conference table. He covered him with his own body, his arms braced over Anton’s head.

The sound arrived—a deep, rolling CRUMP that shook the very air, followed instantly by the screaming shatter of a million windows. The floor beneath them lurched. The lights flickered wildly, then died, plunging them into a darkness stabbed by the emergency strobes that kicked in a second later, casting the room in a hellish, rhythmic blue.

Dust billowed from the ceiling tiles. Alarms shrieked, a deafening, multi-tonal wail. Someone in the room was screaming.

“Report!” Sabatine yelled into his comms, his face pressed close to Anton’s ear. He could feel Anton’s heart hammering against his own chest.

Leon’s voice crackled, sharp with controlled fury. “VBIED! Vehicle-Borne IED. North side, service access road. Massive structural damage on lower floors. Fire on multiple levels. We are compromised. Fallback to Panic Room Alpha, now!”

Sabatine hauled Anton to his feet. The other executives were scrambling, crying out. “With us!” Sabatine commanded, his voice leaving no room for argument. He shoved Anton towards the door, his pistol now in his hand. Leon burst into the corridor from the opposite direction, ushering the stunned department heads into a frantic, stumbling group.

The corridor was a nightmare of swirling dust, falling debris, and the piercing strobe. The air smelled of cordite, burnt plastic, and fear. Sprinklers had activated somewhere, adding a cold, dripping rain to the chaos.

They ran, a huddled, terrified pack, following Leon’s lead towards the core of the building, where the hardened executive panic room was located. Sabatine stayed at the rear, his weapon tracking every shadow, every doorway. This wasn’t Roland Cross. This wasn’t corporate espionage or character assassination. This was terrorism. This was a declaration of total war.

They reached a featureless steel door. Leon punched a code into a keypad, then placed his palm on a scanner. The door hissed open. He shoved the executives inside the dim, reinforced room. “Stay here. Do not open this door for anyone but me or Stalker.”

He turned to Anton and Sabatine, his face grim. “The blast took out our primary exit and the secondary staircase. The fire is climbing. The only clear route is the old freight elevator shaft. It’s manual, rusty, but it bypasses the blast zone. It comes out in the sub-basement parking, east side.”

“Go,” Anton said, his voice astonishingly calm. He looked at the terrified faces of his employees in the panic room. “Get them out through the service tunnels. We’ll take the shaft.”

Leon hesitated for a split second, his loyalty torn. Sabatine met his gaze and gave a sharp nod. Go. Protecting the principal now meant dividing forces.

Leon slammed the panic room door and led the group away on a run.

Sabatine grabbed Anton’s arm. “This way.”

The freight elevator access was a rusted metal door hidden behind a maintenance panel. Sabatine wrenched it open, the hinges screaming in protest. The shaft beyond was a dark, vertical tomb smelling of grease and damp. A manual winch and cable system, a relic from the building’s construction, dangled in the centre.

“You first,” Sabatine said, guiding Anton onto the small, grate-floored platform. “I’ll lower you. When you hit bottom, get clear. I’ll follow.”

“Together,” Anton insisted, his hand clamping on Sabatine’s wrist.

“There’s no time for debate!” Sabatine snarled, the fear for him a live wire in his gut. “This isn’t a negotiation, Anton! Get on the fucking platform!”

The raw command, the fear in Sabatine’s voice, cut through Anton’s defiance. He stepped on it. Sabatine began cranking the winch, the mechanism groaning in protest, lowering Anton into the swallowing darkness. He watched his face, pale in the gloom, until he vanished from sight.

The seconds it took to lower him were an eternity. The building groaned around him. The alarm wails grew muffled, replaced by the more terrifying sound of spreading fire—a deep, hungry roar. Finally, a tug on the cable. Anton was down.

Sabatine hooked himself onto the cable and began his own rapid descent, controlling his fall with his gloved hands, the friction burning through the leather. He landed in a crouch beside Anton in the pitch-black sub-basement. The air here was cooler, thick with concrete dust.

“East side,” Sabatine whispered, pulling a small tactical light from his vest. The beam cut a narrow path through the dark, illuminating pipes, support columns, and decades of forgotten storage.

They moved quickly, silently, towards the distant glow of an exit sign. Sabatine’s mind was racing. VBIED. Military grade. Roland Cross had connections, but this was a different level of brutality, of resources. He isn’t the only enemy. The thought was ice in his veins. They had been looking in the wrong direction, at the propagandist, while a more vicious predator had been closing in.

They reached a heavy fire door. Sabatine listened, heard nothing, and pushed it open. They emerged into a dimly lit section of the underground parking garage. Their modified SUV, part of the decoy convoy, was parked where Leon had arranged, fifty yards away.

They were ten feet from the vehicle when the headlights of a black van parked in the shadows flared to life, blinding them.

Sabatine shoved Anton behind a concrete pillar, drawing his pistol. The van’s side door slid open. Not with the clatter of a paramilitary team, but with a smooth, electric whisper.

A figure stepped out. Not a soldier. A woman in an elegant, dark wool coat. She was in her fifties, with sharp, intelligent features and silver hair cut in a severe bob. She held nothing in her hands.

“Anton, darling,” she said, her voice carrying easily across the empty garage. It was a voice Sabatine had heard only in boardroom recordings and financial news clips from a decade ago.

Anton went rigid beside him. His hand gripped Sabatine’s arm, his fingers digging in like claws.

“Mother,” Anton breathed, the word a curse and a prayer of pure, undiluted horror.

Sabatine’s world tilted on its axis. The final piece of the conspiracy slotted into place with a click that echoed in his soul. Not just a vengeful brother. Not just a greedy CFO. Not just a hired propagandist.

The architect of it all was Eleanor Rogers-Voss. Anton’s mother. The widow who had vanished into European high society after her husband’s death, presumed a grieving recluse.

She smiled, a cold, perfect curve of her lips. “Did you really think a few boardroom squabbles and a disgraced spy were your only inheritance troubles?” She tilted her head, her eyes, the same icy blue as Anton’s, glinting in the van’s light. “I built this company with your father. And I will burn it to the ground before I let you give it to him.”

Her gaze landed on Sabatine, and in it was a hatred so profound, so personal, it was like a physical blow. The bomb had been a distraction. She was the real attack. And they were cornered, not by faceless mercenaries, but by the ghost of the very legacy Anton had fought so hard to protect.