Chapter 51 - A New Hideout
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I dragged Audrey up from the drainage pipe, laying her gently onto a cleared folding table. The gunshot wound had passed clean through her side, missing her vital organs, but she had lost a lot of blood.
"I patched it up down there," Audrey winced as I applied fresh gauze and pressure. "They hit us fast, Elena. Professional hit squad. I locked Nico in the drainage pipe before they breached the blast doors. I played dead under the bodies of their own men. They assumed I bled out."
"You did good, Audrey," I whispered, tightening the bandage. "You kept him safe. That's all that matters."
"They tore the servers apart looking for the ledger," she gritted her teeth, sitting up slowly. "Julian’s men didn’t find what they were looking for, which means they will keep hunting us."
"We can't stay here," Nicolás said, his voice shaking, but his eyes showing a new, hardened resolve. "If they know about this place, they know about the others."
He was right. The Viper syndicate had resources that rivaled small nations. If we stayed on the grid, we were dead.
"We go completely dark," I decided, helping Audrey to her feet. "No digital footprint, no cell phones, no vehicles with GPS."
We slipped out of the broken safehouse through the city's labyrinthine storm drain system, emerging near a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Chicago. I paid a paranoid, off-the-grid mechanic in solid gold coins for a battered, unregistered 1990s pickup truck that had no electronic chips in its engine.
We drove through the night, heading deep into the unforgiving wilderness of the northern Michigan forests.
My grandfather used to own a dilapidated hunting cabin up here, completely devoid of electricity, running water, or cellular reception. It was a ghost structure, erased from property tax records decades ago.
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When we finally pulled up to the rotting wooden porch, the silence of the woods felt deafening. We were isolated. But isolation meant safety, at least temporarily.
I bolted the heavy wooden door shut, lighting a single kerosene lantern on the table. "Julian wants the ledger. Tomorrow, we figure out where my father actually hid it. Before Julian figures it out first."
