Chapter 239: Anton’s Reappearance

The world had dissolved into a red roar. The gash on Sabatine’s arm was a river of fire, the blood loss a cold tide pulling him toward a grey, silent shore. The medics’ voices were distant buzzes, their hands firm but unreal as they applied tourniquets and pressed gauze. His vision tunnelled, the opulent, shattered foyer narrowing to Anton’s face on the stretcher beside him, pale but alive, his grey eyes holding Sabatine’s with fierce, unwavering focus.

They were loading them into separate ambulances. Protocol. Sabatine tried to protest, his voice a slurred growl, but his body was no longer listening. The adrenaline that had forged him into a weapon for the last twelve hours had finally, completely burned out, leaving only wreckage.

He felt the stretcher lift, the world tilt. Anton’s hand, the point of his universe, was pulled from his grasp.

“Together…” he tried to say, but the word was lost.

Then, a new sound cut through the medical clamor. Not a siren, not a shout. A voice, amplified, booming across the rain-slicked driveway from a police loudspeaker.

“Elias Kaine. We have the building surrounded. Exit with your hands visible. You have one minute.”

Kaine. They hadn’t found him yet. He was still in the house, a wounded scorpion in the walls.

Sabatine’s fading consciousness sparked. They’d left him broken in the hallway. But broken didn’t mean harmless. He’d had a knife. He might have another. He was a man who kept secrets in his very bones.

He tried to sit up. A firm hand pushed him back down. “Sir, you need to stay still. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

His vision swam. He saw Anton’s ambulance doors close. Saw it begin to pull away, its lights painting the mist in frantic swirls of blue.

Panic, colder than blood loss, seized him. They were separating them. And Kaine was still loose.

---

Inside the mansion, the tactical teams moved with methodical precision. Room by room, corridor by corridor. They found the blood trail, the shattered mirror, the discarded weapons. They found the hidden door to the roof. But the primary target was not in the attic, not on the roof.

Elias Kaine, master of exits, had used the chaos of the initial police breach, the focus on the wounded men in the foyer, to slip away once more. Not far. He couldn’t go far. He was bleeding, one arm destroyed, his strength ebbing with every heartbeat. He had retreated to the one place no one would think to look for a man fleeing a siege: down.

The wine cellar.

It was a vaulted, cavernous space beneath the kitchen, reached by a narrow, curved stone staircase. It was cold, dark, and lined with racks holding dusty bottles worth more than most houses. And in its farthest, darkest corner, behind a rack of 1945 Bordeaux, was a small, iron door—an old coal chute, long disused, that led to a narrow air shaft and, eventually, to the old boiler room and a forgotten exterior grate. His final, pathetic bolt-hole.

Kaine leaned against the cold stone wall, sliding down until he sat on the damp earth floor. The pain was a universe. His right side was a single, screaming nerve ending. His breath came in shallow, ragged hitches. He fumbled in his pack with his left hand, his movements clumsy. A syringe of morphine. He jammed it into his thigh, sighing as the chemical warmth spread, blunting the sharpest edges of the agony.

He had failed. The narrative was in tatters. But he was not in custody. He had the syringe, a second passport, a stack of high-denomination Swiss notes in a waterproof pouch. If he could reach the grate, if he could crawl into the woods, he could still disappear. He would be a cripple, a phantom in constant pain, but he would be free. He would live to… to what? The thought was empty. There was no ‘after’ for him, only endless hiding.

But it was better than a cell. Better than Sabatine Stalker’s cold, victorious eyes.

He heard the boots above. Muffled shouts. “Clear!” They were searching the main floors. They’d check the cellar soon. He had to move.

He pushed himself up, using the wine rack for support. The morphine made the world soft at the edges. He shuffled toward the iron door, his one good hand fumbling for the rusted latch.

---

The ambulance carrying Anton had only made it to the end of the main drive when he sat bolt upright, ripping the oxygen mask from his face. The medic beside him protested.

“Stop the vehicle,” Anton said, his voice quiet but vibrating with an intensity that brooked no argument.

“Mr. Rogers, you have internal bleeding, a possible concussion—”

“Stop. The. Vehicle.” Anton’s eyes were no longer those of a patient. They were the flinty eyes of the man who had rebuilt an empire, who had fought with a fire extinguisher and a length of brass beam. “He’s still in there.”

“Who is?”

“The man who did this.” Anton’s hand went to the bandage on his ribs. “He doesn’t surrender. He has another way out. And Sabatine…” He looked back toward the receding mansion, a dark silhouette against the grey dawn. Sabatine was wounded, being taken away, helpless. If Kaine slipped free… the thought was intolerable.

The ambulance slowed, the driver unsure.

“I am Anton Rogers,” he said again, this time layering every ounce of his billionaire’s authority into the name. “You will turn this vehicle around, and you will radio to the commander on site that I am returning to assist in the apprehension. Now.”

Perhaps it was the sheer audacity, perhaps the residual power of the name, but the driver complied. The ambulance executed a clumsy U-turn on the narrow lane and sped back toward the mansion.

They arrived as a team was preparing to descend into the cellar. The police commander, a harried-looking man with a thick mustache, stormed over as Anton emerged, leaning heavily on the ambulance door. “Mr. Rogers, this is highly irregular! You need to be in the hospital!”

“He’s in the cellar,” Anton stated, ignoring him. “There will be a secondary egress. An old delivery chute, a coal vent, something. He’ll be making for it now.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“Because I know how he thinks.” Anton pushed past him, moving toward the kitchen entrance. “And I’m the only one here he didn’t expect to see again.”

He took the stone stairs down to the cellar alone, ignoring the shouted orders to stop. The police followed, weapons raised, but they held back, letting him enter first. He was a civilian, but he was also a key witness, a victim, and he moved with a certainty that gave them pause.

The cellar was icy, the air thick with the smell of earth and old wine. The single police torch beam cut through the gloom, illuminating the endless racks.

And there, in the far corner, caught in the act of forcing a stubborn iron door, was Elias Kaine. He was a ghastly sight—bloody, pale, moving with the drugged, deliberate slowness of a man operating on sheer will alone. He heard the footsteps, the shuffle of many boots on stone, and froze.

He turned, expecting to see a wall of tactical armor, the blinding light of a torch in his face.

He did not expect to see Anton Rogers.

Anton stood at the base of the stairs, bloodied, his clothes torn, his posture held upright by sheer defiance. He was unarmed. He was broken. But he was alive. And he was here.

Kaine’s pale eyes, clouded with pain and morphine, widened in genuine, unfeigned shock. This was an impossibility. The narrative had been clear: Rogers, grievously wounded, taken away. He was a piece that had been removed from the board. His reappearance was a violation of the story’s internal logic.

For a long, suspended second, the two men stared at each other across the cold, dark space. The billionaire and the ghost. The legacy and the eraser.

“It’s over, Kaine,” Anton said, his voice echoing softly in the vaulted space. No shout. No grand declaration. A simple statement of fact.

Kaine’s gaze flickered from Anton to the armed police now fanning out behind him, their laser sights painting red dots on his chest. He looked at the iron door, so close, then back at Anton. The syringe’s false courage drained away, leaving behind the hollow, aching truth of his failure.

His shoulders slumped. The last vestige of the fight left him. He wasn’t defeated by the guns, by the overwhelming force. He was defeated by the reappearance of a man who should, by all rights, be gone. A man whose stubborn refusal to follow the script had corrupted every page of Kaine’s elegant, bloody story.

He let go of the iron door latch. It clanged shut with a final, hollow sound.

He raised his one good hand, slowly, in a gesture of surrender, his eyes never leaving Anton’s.

Anton didn’t smile. He didn’t gloat. He just watched as the police surged forward, roughly securing the broken ghost who had tried to erase him. He had burst from the stairwell, bloodied but alive, and in that moment, he had not just captured a man. He had shattered the final, desperate illusion of his control.

He turned and walked back up the stone stairs, into the dawn light, leaving the darkness and the ghost behind. Sabatine was waiting.

—