Chapter 237: The Rooftop Confrontation

The embrace on the rocky shore was brief, a stolen moment of raw humanity in a landscape of wreckage. The hiss of the dying helicopter, the shouts of Rico’s men securing the scene, the distant wail of sirens finally converging on the estate—it all pressed in, demanding action.

Sabatine pulled back, his hands gripping Anton’s shoulders. “The police are minutes away. Rico will handle the scene, giving a sanitized version. But you…” He looked at Anton’s grey face, the blood seeping through his fingers where he pressed his side. “You need a hospital. Now.”

Anton shook his head, a stubborn set to his jaw. “Not until we’re sure. Not until I see him…” His eyes drifted past Sabatine to the smashed fuselage.

“He’s gone, Anton.” Sabatine’s voice was firm, final. “I saw him. It’s over.”

But as the words left his mouth, a cold, familiar instinct prickled at the base of his skull. A dissonance. The scene was too neat. The crash, the body… Kaine was a man of layers, of redundancies. A man who turned vaults into tombs and escaped into feints.

He looked back at the wreck. Rico was directing his men, creating a perimeter. The body was still in the seat, a dark shape through the broken window.

“Stay with Leon,” Sabatine ordered, his voice low. “Do not move.”

He waded back into the water, ignoring the cold that now bit deep into his bones. He approached the wreck, his eyes scanning every detail—the angle of impact, the dispersal of debris, the way the body was positioned.

Rico saw him coming, his expression grim. “He’s finished. Took a strut to the chest. No pulse.”

Sabatine didn’t answer. He climbed onto the tilted skid, peering into the cabin. The smell of fuel, blood, and burnt electronics was overwhelming. Kaine was there, slumped, impaled. The face was right. The suit was right.

But the posture… it was too… relaxed. A man speared through the chest would be arched in agony, muscles clenched in a final, violent spasm. This body was slack, almost arranged.

And the blood… it was pooled, yes. But it was also smeared in a way that suggested movement after impact.

Sabatine’s gaze swept the cabin interior. Behind the pilot’s seat, partially obscured by a folded partition, was a small access panel—for maintenance, for electrical systems. It was slightly ajar.

His blood went cold.

He shoved past Rico and leaned into the wreckage, ignoring the creak of unstable metal. He grabbed the body by the shoulder of its expensive grey suit and pulled.

It came away too easily. Not a body. A mannequin. A sophisticated, weighted replica, dressed in Kaine’s clothes, fitted with blood packs that had ruptured on impact. The “impalement” was a cleverly rigged piece of sharpened debris.

The pilot was real. He was dead. A pawn sacrificed for the final, perfect illusion.

Kaine had bugged out. Again. The helicopter wasn’t his escape; it was his final, grand diversion. While they were all focused on the crashing bird, he had slipped away through the maintenance access, which likely led to a pre-positioned compartment or even an underwater egress point.

Sabatine threw the mannequin aside in disgust, a roar of pure frustration building in his chest. He had been playing. At the very moment of supposed victory.

He scrambled out of the wreck, his eyes raking the shoreline, the tree line, the mansion. Where? The estate was vast. He could be anywhere by now.

Then he saw it. A flicker of movement on the highest, farthest point of the Rothschild mansion—the flat, lead-covered roof of the central tower, a vantage point that surveyed the entire domain. A figure, indistinct in the mist, moving toward the far edge.

“ROOFTOP!” Sabatine yelled, pointing. “HE’S ON THE ROOF!”

He didn’t wait for Rico or his men. He was already running, a surge of adrenaline burning through the cold and exhaustion. He sprinted across the rocky shore, up the slope, across the lawn, and back toward the brooding house. Anton’s shouted question was lost behind him.

He entered through a shattered terrace door, took the main staircase three steps at a time, his body screaming in protest. He passed opulent, empty rooms, his focus a tunnel leading up. He found a narrow servants' stairwell that led to the attic, then a final, rusty ladder bolted to the wall leading to a roof hatch.

He shoved it open and emerged into the biting wind forty meters above the ground.

The rooftop was a world of grey lead, copper-green finials, and chimneystacks like silent sentinels. The mist swirled, reducing visibility to a hundred feet. And there, standing near the parapet at the far northern edge, was Elias Kaine.

He had shed his suit jacket. He wore a dark, practical sweater and trousers, a small pack slung over one shoulder. He held a compact pistol, not aimed at Sabatine, but held loosely at his side. He looked… resigned. But not defeated. A chess master who has lost his queen and bishops, but still sees paths across the board.

“Mr. Stalker,” Kaine called, his voice carrying flatly on the damp air. “I admit, I underestimated your tenacity. And your friend on the boat. That was a… creative solution.”

Sabatine advanced slowly, his own weapon raised. The rain-slicked lead underfoot was treacherous. “It’s done, Kaine. The estate is surrounded. Your exits are gone. It’s over.”

“Is it?” Kaine asked, tilting his head. He glanced over the parapet. Below was a seventy-foot drop to a formal garden, then the lake. “There’s always one more exit. The question is one of aesthetics.” He looked back at Sabatine. “You’ve proven remarkably resistant to narrative correction. A protagonist who refuses his tragic end.”

“I’m not your protagonist,” Sabatine snarled, closing the distance. Twenty feet. “I’m the consequence you didn’t factor in.”

Kaine’s smile was thin, ghostly. “The ‘Worldbreaker’ as a force of moral consequence. I suppose there’s a certain poetry to it.” He raised his pistol, not to shoot, but in a gesture of acknowledgement. “But you see, even consequences can be managed. Contained. Or failing that, used.”

He was stalling. But for what? Reinforcements? There were none left. A last trap?

Then Sabatine saw it. Kaine’s free hand, behind his back, held a small device. Not a remote. A data key. And his eyes kept flicking to a specific chimney stack, where a discreet, waterproof antenna was mounted.

He wasn’t trying to escape physically. He was trying to transmit. To send the contents of that key—the true Aegis schematics? The evidence of the conspiracy?—somewhere, to someone, as a final, posthumous poison pill or bargaining chip.

“Drop it,” Sabatine commanded, his finger tightening on the trigger. “The key. Now.”

Kaine’s smile didn’t waver. “Or what? You’ll shoot me? And then what? You’ll have a corpse, and my associates will have the data. A pyrrhic victory.” He took a step backward, toward the antenna. “This ends one of two ways, Mr. Stalker. You lower your weapon, and I walk to that antenna, send this, and then you can take me into custody. A messy, public trial, but I live. Or you fire, and the data flies the second my heart stops, triggered by a biometric monitor. You win the battle, but the war’s purpose is lost.”

It was a classic Kaine move. A choice between two bad options, both serving his ends. He was skilled, a master of leverage until the last breath.

But Sabatine was fueled by something fiercer than strategy, colder than logic. He was fueled by the memory of Anton’s broken body in the flooded dark, by the phantom feel of a knife at his own throat, by the countless ghosts Kaine had created in his clean, quiet way. He was fueled by love, and by a rage that love had forged into an unbreakable blade.

He didn’t lower his weapon. He took another step forward. “You don’t get to dictate the terms anymore,” he said, his voice deathly calm. “You don’t get to use him, or me, or anyone else, as pieces in your story ever again.”

Kaine’s composure finally cracked, just a hair. The certainty in his eyes wavered, replaced by a flicker of confusion. This wasn’t following the script. “You’re bluffing. You won’t risk the data.”

“The data is a ghost,” Sabatine said, still advancing. “We have the chip. We have Jessica Abara. We have the truth. Your data is just noise. And you…” He was ten feet away now. “You’re just a man on a roof who’s run out of tricks.”

He saw the decision flash in Kaine’s eyes—a micro-expression of pure, startled realization that his final, perfect leverage was dust. That he was facing not a rational opponent, but an elemental force.

Kaine moved. Not toward the antenna, but sideways, bringing his pistol up in a smooth, practiced arc to aim at Sabatine’s centre mass.

Sabatine was already moving. He didn’t dive for cover. He charged.

He fired as he ran, not expecting to hit, but to disrupt. The shot went wide, pinging off a copper gutter.

Kaine’s shot was faster, more precise. Sabatine felt a searing impact high on his left thigh—a clean, through-and-through wound. The leg buckled, but his momentum carried him forward.

He crashed into Kaine just as the man was squeezing off a second shot. The bullet whined past Sabatine’s ear. They went down in a tangle on the wet lead, weapons skittering away.

Kaine was strong, wiry, trained. He fought with a cold, efficient savagery, aiming for eyes, throat, and Sabatine's gunshot leg. But Sabatine fought with the berserk strength of a cornered animal who has lost everything but the will to destroy the thing that cornered him. He blocked a knife-hand strike, took a fist to his wounded shoulder, and drove his own forehead into Kaine’s nose.

Blood exploded. Kaine grunted, his grip faltering.

Sabatine rolled on top of him, pinning him. His hands found Kaine’s throat. He didn’t squeeze. He just held him there, his face inches from the ghost’s, their breath mingling in plumes of steam in the cold air.

“Look at me,” Sabatine growled, the words ripped from a place of deep, dark truth. “Look at the consequences.”

Kaine’s pale eyes, wide with pain and shock, stared up at him. He saw no negotiation there. No deal. Only the end.

Sabatine leaned close, his voice a whisper meant for Kaine alone. “You don’t get a story. You get silence.”

He released Kaine’s throat with one hand, reached to his own boot, and pulled out the long, wicked screwdriver he’d carried from the storage closet. A tool for breaking, for prying things open.

Kaine’s eyes tracked the movement, understanding dawning. He began to struggle anew, a frantic, final thrashing.

It was too late.

Sabatine drove the screwdriver down, not into his heart, not into a fatal spot. He aimed for the junction of Kaine’s right shoulder and chest, a precise, brutal strike that severed nerves and shattered bone. Kaine’s right arm—his shooting arm, his transmitting arm—went instantly, permanently limp.

A scream, short and sharp, was torn from Kaine. Not of pain, but of sheer, utter horror at the permanence of the damage. He was a craftsman, and Sabatine had shattered his primary tool.

Sabatine leaned over him, his own blood mixing with Kaine’s on the wet lead. “You live,” he hissed. “You live in a cell, with one useless arm, and the knowledge that you lost. To me. To us. That’s your ending.”

He stood up, limping, leaving Elias Kaine broken and whimpering on the rooftop, the data key glinting uselessly a few feet away. The confrontation was over. The ghost had been given flesh, and flesh could be broken.

Sabatine picked up both their weapons, retrieved the data key, and crushed it under his heel. Then he walked to the edge of the roof, ignoring the pain in his leg, and looked down.

Anton and Leon were on the lawn below, staring up, their faces etched with fear and hope.

Sabatine raised a hand, a slow, weary gesture. It was done.

He turned his back on the broken man sobbing on the lead, and began the long, painful climb down to the living, to the future, to the man he loved.

—-