Chapter 13 - The Ultimatum in the Dark
-13-
Leah gripped the heavy plastic receiver so hard her knuckles turned white. Outside, thunder rolled across the Guernsey County hills, shaking the glass in the cabin's windowpanes.
“You don't own me, Nathan,” Leah said, her voice steady and clear, cutting through the static on the line. “And you don't own my son.”
Nathan chuckled—a dry, humorless sound that sent a shiver down her spine. “Keep telling yourself that, Leah. Look out the front window.”
Leah slowly turned away from the phone, walking on silent feet to the frosted front window of the cabin. She pulled back the heavy plaid curtain by an inch.
Parked at the end of the overgrown dirt drive, fifty yards from the cabin porch, were two black SUVs with their headlights switched off. Their engines idled with a deep, muffled rumble, exhaust pipes billowing white clouds into the pouring rain. The silhouette of a man stood beside the lead vehicle, holding a heavy-duty tactical flashlight pointed directly at the front door.
“I gave you every chance to handle this quietly,” Nathan’s voice continued through the earpiece, cold and detached. “We could have checked you into a private wellness facility in Switzerland. You could have lived out your life with a comfortable quarterly allowance. But you chose the hard way.”
“You’re a monster, Nathan,” Leah whispered.
“I’m a realist,” Nathan replied smoothly. “Open the front door and bring the baby out to the car. If you do it now, nobody gets hurt. Mae gets to keep her nursing license and a quiet severance package. And you get to walk away without a federal warrant following you for kidnapping.”
Leah looked back over her shoulder. Mae was standing by the desk, her face pale, her hands hovering over the keyboard where the encrypted whistleblower files were still uploading to the federal server with twenty percent remaining.
“Twenty percent,” Mae mouthed silently, her eyes wide with panic. Just two more minutes.
Leah turned her gaze back to the window, watching the beam of the tactical flashlight sweep across the porch steps.
“You think you’ve won, Nathan,” Leah said, her voice rising slightly, steadying with a fierce, unbreakable courage. “You think money and institutional power can buy everything. But you forgot one thing.”
“What’s that?” Nathan asked, a flicker of irritation breaking through his calm facade.
“You’re dealing with a mother who has nothing left to lose.”
Leah slammed the heavy receiver down onto the cradle, cutting off Nathan’s voice mid-sentence.
“Mae!” Leah shouted, spinning around. “How much longer?”
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“Ten percent!” Mae’s fingers danced across the keys in a blur. “The federal server is receiving the core archive now!”
Headlights flared blindingly bright outside as the two black SUVs surged forward down the dirt drive, crunching over gravel and brush as they pulled directly up to the front porch of the cabin. Heavy boots hit the wooden steps with a loud, threatening thud.
