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All Chapters of Between You and the Bullet: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

51 Chapters

Chapter 41: The Unseen Route

Before leaving the thirty-sixth floor, Nathan asked the bank one final question.“How many doors open into the internal stairwell between here and twenty-nine?”Three.Thirty-four, thirty-two, and thirty.All required employee access cards, but the access-control system had been unstable since the explosion.“Can you lock all three remotely?”“Not with certainty. The system shows them as locked, but every time it reboots, the status has to be verified again.”“Then we don’t trust it.”Nathan ended the call.A system saying something was secure no longer meant he would treat it as secure.“Let’s move.”Audrey nodded.The bank officer took point. Audrey followed, with Nathan immediately beside her. The facilities technician and the second officer remained on thirty-six. More people did not necessarily mean more safety. Right now, i

Last Updated : 2026-10-26

Chapter 42: One Hundred Meters to the Exit

The heavy doors slid apart.Nathan did not step out immediately. Keeping his weapon in his left hand, he used the widening gap to check the sixth-floor mechanical level. A gray service corridor stretched ahead beneath exposed pipes, with emergency lights spaced along the walls and metal doors leading into equipment rooms on the right.No movement.No footsteps.Only the low vibration of the building itself humming through the floor.“Stay here.”Nathan left Audrey inside the elevator and stepped only far enough out to clear the blind angles. He checked both sides, had the bank officer cover the opposite direction, then finally signaled to her.“Come on.”The moment Audrey stepped out, the elevator doors began to close behind them.No one had touched the controls.Nathan turned as the doors sealed, and the display changed from six to seven.Then eight.“Did someone call i

Last Updated : 2026-10-27

Chapter 43: The Last Two Levels

Even after the metal door locked behind them, Nathan did not move immediately.They had put one solid barrier between themselves and the shadow following them.That did not make them safe.Daniel kept part of his attention on the connecting door they had just come through while Nathan scanned the parking structure ahead. Unlike the mechanical level inside the bank tower, the garage was lit in clean white, but concrete pillars and parked vehicles created blind spots everywhere, and the emergency alarms from the main building echoed faintly through the structure.“The car is on four?” Nathan asked.Daniel nodded.“Yes. We’re on six, so two levels down. Owen’s waiting in the north section. We dropped the SUV we originally planned to use and switched to a sedan. Right now, only Owen and I know where it is.”“Keep it that way.”Nathan turned to Audrey.“We take the interna

Last Updated : 2026-10-28

Chapter 44: The Day It Stopped Being a Threat

The car did not take them to a hospital.Instead, they drove to an unmarked low-rise building some distance from central Manhattan. From the outside, it looked like a small office used by corporate clients, but the basement housed a private medical unit contracted by Nathan’s firm, equipped to handle trauma ranging from deep lacerations to gunshot wounds.Owen drove into the underground entrance, and no one opened the doors until the security shutter had closed completely behind them.“Audrey, get out first.”Nathan said it exactly as he always did.Then he tried to stand.For less than a second, he stopped.That was all.Audrey saw it anyway.“Nathan.”“I can get out.”“I didn’t ask.”She threw his own words back at him, and Nathan said nothing.Daniel opened the rear door from the opposite side.“We made it this far. Yo

Last Updated : 2026-10-29

Chapter 45: It Wasn’t Meant to Kill Her

Inside the evidence bag Maya had brought was a small piece of scorched, warped metal.Audrey had no idea what part of the device it had once been. Nathan did not touch the bag either. He studied the fragment through the clear plastic.“When you say professional, how professional?”“I don’t mean military-grade. And I don’t mean some movie version of special forces engineering. I mean someone who understands how to produce a specific effect and make a device function where they intend it to. The wiring wasn’t sloppy, the placement wasn’t careless, and they didn’t leave much behind that they didn’t need to. The bomb squad’s preliminary assessment is that whoever built it had done this before.”Maya placed a tablet on the table.A simplified layout of the west side of the bank appeared on the screen, with the blast site marked in red.“The device was placed in a utility space beside the service corridor. Not somewhere the public normally passes

Last Updated : 2026-10-30

Chapter 46: Someone Was Watching

Whatever small relief had entered the room disappeared when Maya spoke again.“There’s one more thing.”She looked back at the tablet.“The triggering system. Right now, remote activation looks likely.”“Not a timer?” Audrey asked.“Not just a simple timer. The preliminary assessment is that whoever built it may have been able to choose the moment of detonation remotely.”Nathan straightened slightly.“Then it may not have been set in advance to match the original schedule.”“Exactly. Someone may have been watching what was happening that day and decided when to trigger it.”The air in the room changed.Audrey replayed the timeline.The meeting ended nineteen minutes early.The suspicious van was discovered.They moved to the thirty-ninth floor.The original departure time approached.Then the blast.“They knew where I was?”“We can’t say that,” Nathan answered imme

Last Updated : 2026-10-31

Chapter 47: The Shadow of Victor Shaw

The comparison results came in about thirty minutes later.Maya reviewed the material sent to her phone, then placed the screen on the table without speaking.The man caught on camera across from the bank.Victor Shaw, taken from earlier surveillance footage.The two images sat side by side.Neither was clear enough for a reliable facial comparison. But height, shoulder width, stride length, the slight outward turn of the right foot when he stepped forward—and even a distinctive feature near the right wrist seen in previous footage—all overlapped.“There’s a strong possibility it’s the same man.”Maya still stopped short of calling it certain.“Video analysis alone isn’t enough for an arrest warrant. But this is the strongest thing we’ve had so far connecting Victor Shaw to today’s scene.”Audrey studied the two images.“He was there for at least ten minutes before the explosion?”“That’s what we can confir

Last Updated : 2026-11-01

Chapter 48: Eleven Minutes on the Twenty-Fourth Floor

The Midtown building where Victor got out of the cab housed three law firms, along with a corporate crisis-management company, an accounting firm, an investment advisory business, and two investigative firms.That alone was far too broad to identify where he had gone.So Maya’s team started with the cab’s arrival at 2:47 p.m. and rebuilt his movement through the building from there.In the small conference room at the medical site, Maya turned her laptop toward them.The first footage came from the ground-floor lobby.Less than an hour had passed since the explosion at the bank. The man believed to be Victor entered through the main doors without a hat or glasses, crossed the lobby without stopping at reception or the visitor kiosks, and headed directly for the elevators.The camera never caught a clear frontal view of his face.It did capture the familiar slight outward turn of his right foot as he walked.“H

Last Updated : 2026-11-02

Chapter 49: Two Gaps

They identified the source of the phone case later that evening.Maya opened the report from the analysis team. On the screen was a black leather case with a small gold fitting near the bottom.“We traced the manufacturer. It isn’t sold commercially. It’s issued with secure corporate devices, and the case itself can’t be bought separately at retail.”Audrey reached into her bag almost without thinking.She took out the device she used for work and placed it on the table.“…This?”Hers was deep brown rather than black, but the leather trim was the same.So was the small gold fitting at the bottom.Maya compared them.“That’s it.”Nathan looked at Audrey’s phone.“Sterling-issued?”“Yes. Secure executive device. I’ve had it since the last replacement cycle. I never realized the case itself was custom.&rdquo

Last Updated : 2026-11-03

Chapter 50: The Connection Eleven Days Ago

The missing Sterling reserve device had connected to the network from New Jersey eleven days earlier.By itself, that fact still had several possible explanations.An employee might have taken it out without completing the proper paperwork. It could have been moved to another office during a replacement cycle. The device-management records themselves might simply have been wrong.That was why Maya still refused to call it a stolen device.“We narrowed the connection down to a small office building in Newark.”The next morning, Maya spread a fresh set of records across the table in front of Audrey and Nathan, who were still at the private medical facility.Nathan’s right arm remained immobilized.His doctor had told him to rest, but he had already changed into normal clothes and was turning pages with his left hand as though the instruction had never been given.“Can you tell who used it?” he asked.

Last Updated : 2026-11-04

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