Chapter 7 - The Desperate Trap
Driven mad by desperation and impending prison time, Marcus made a fatal decision. If he was going down, he wasn't going down alone. He needed leverage, and in his twisted mind, the only leverage left was my unborn child.
Late Thursday night, Marcus met with three private security contractors at a dive bar on the outskirts of the city—mercenaries who worked in the grey areas of the law, paid with the last of Arthur’s hidden emergency jewelry collection.
"I need a retrieval operation," Marcus told the lead mercenary, a scarred man named Briggs. "My wife is being held at an estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I need her extracted tonight. Alive. The baby is my insurance policy against her brother."
"An estate in the mountains?" Briggs squinted, looking at the coordinates Marcus slid across the table. "That's Gabriel Vance's property. He’s ex-Ranger Recon. You're asking us to walk into a meat grinder."
"I don't care about his military record!" Marcus hissed, his desperation making him reckless. "He’s one man! There are four of us, and we have element of surprise. Just get me through the gate. I'll handle my wife."
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What Marcus didn't know was that Gabriel had anticipated this exact move. The coordinates Marcus had extracted from a hidden GPS tracker on my old car hadn't been discovered by accident; Gabriel had intentionally left the tracker active, baiting the trap to draw Marcus out of his suburban hole and into an environment where the law of the jungle prevailed.
At midnight, a black van cut its headlights and rolled silently to a halt outside the iron gates of Gabriel’s mountain compound. The heavy storm clouds overhead obscured the moon, plunging the forest into total darkness—the exact same darkness Marcus had tried to weaponize in the kitchen just days ago.
