All Chapters of THE MAFIA'S BLOODY POSSESSION: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

 Nikolai's Pov Rem told me about the private meeting at nine in the morning. He told me Ace had requested it and that Ivan had allowed it and that the two of them had been alone in the secondary room for forty minutes. I was standing in the corridor outside the secondary room when Ace came out. He saw me immediately. He stopped. "How long have you been standing there," he said. "Long enough," I said. He looked at me. "I can explain." "Come with me," I said. I walked to the operations room and he followed and I closed the door and stood with my back to it. "He offered you a way out," I said. Ace did not look surprised that I knew. "Yes," he said. "A new identity," I said. "A clean life outside this world." "Yes," he said.

 Nikolai's Pov We needed a doctor before anything else. The nearest town was forty minutes away and I drove it in thirty-two with Ivan in the back seat holding Ace and monitoring his breathing the entire way. The town had a single medical clinic. The doctor there was a woman in her sixties who asked no unnecessary questions when I told her it was urgent and showed her the color of Ace's skin and the tremor that had started again in his hands. She ran a basic blood panel on the equipment she had. The results took forty minutes. She came out of the back room and put the printed results on the desk in front of me without sitting down. "Systematic poisoning," she said. "The markers are consistent with a compound that accumulates over time. It is not something that happens from a single exposure." She looked at me. "This person has been ingesting a very small amount of something regularly for

Ivan's PovThe open exit was a corridor between two buildings and it was sixty meters long and exposed on both sides and we were twenty meters into it before I understood the geometry of what we had walked into."Back," I said."The building is behind us," Rem said."Back to the building," I said. "The corridor is a kill zone."We turned. Nikolai was already turning. The people at the building entrance were moving to cut off the return. We had approximately eight seconds.We made it back through the building door and Nikolai pulled it shut and held it. Three of Rem's people who had come with us braced it from inside."Secondary exit," I said. "There has to be a secondary exit."Rem moved to the back of the building. He found a service door in the loading area. It was not on the original building map. "It could be covered," I said."Everything is covered," Rem said. "This is the least covered option."I looked at Nikolai. He looked at me. "Ace goes first," Nikolai said. "Rem stays wit

Ivan's PovNone of us slept after reading the message.Nikolai put the phone down on the floor between us and the three of us sat against the bed and no one said anything for a long time. The room was very still. Outside the building the city was doing what it always did and had no idea what had just landed in this room."The Castro DNA result was falsified," Nikolai said eventually."Yes," Ace said. "That is what Calloway is saying.""Which means someone inside our network falsified it," Nikolai said. "The test was run through our own lab contact.""Harlan," I said."Harlan had access to the sample chain," Nikolai said. "He was managing the logistics for that operation.""He switched the result," I said. "Or altered it, to point the paternity at Castro instead of Calloway.""Why," Ace said."Because Calloway was building a case against us," I said. "If Ace believed his biological father was Castro instead of a federal agent with a personal mission then the emotional leverage ran a d

Nikolai's PovRem found the coffee shop through the secondary relay trace at nine in the morning. The trace was clean and Ace had been careful, but not careful enough to account for the signal the secondary device had emitted when it connected to the relay to confirm the meeting location three days prior.Three days prior. He had arranged the meeting three days before showing us the message.I sat with that for exactly as long as it took me to get into the vehicle.Ivan was beside me. He had said nothing since we left the building. He did not say anything during the drive. We both understood what we were going to. We did not need to describe it to each other.The coffee shop was empty by the time we arrived. The owner confirmed two people had been in the back corner for approximately forty minutes and had left separately. The man left first. The younger one sat for another ten minutes and then left through the side exit.We picked up Ace's trail from the side exit through Rem's stree