Chapter 8 - The Race Against The Blackout
“Dad!” Claire screamed into the phone.
The line clicked into static, followed by a flat, terrifying silence.
“Claire, what happened?” Adrien demanded, stepping toward her, his face taut
with panic.
“They’re taking him!” Claire sobbed, clutching the phone against her chest as
pure terror ripped through her. “Someone claiming to be from Blackwood
Enterprises is at the hospital! They disconnected his monitors!”
Adrien didn't ask another question. He grabbed his coat from the back of the
chair.
“Marcus! Call the chief of police directly! Tell him there is an active
kidnapping in progress at St. Jude’s Pavilion! Authorize every private Blackwood
security vehicle within five miles to converge on the medical district!”
“On it!” Marcus shouted, sprinting out of the office with his phone already
pressed to his ear.
Adrien grabbed Claire’s hand. Her fingers were ice-cold and trembling, but he
held them with an iron grip.
“We’re taking the private express elevator to the underground garage. Stay close
to me.”
They sprinted down the executive corridor, bypassing the stunned receptionists
and security guards. Adrien hit the biometric scanner on the private elevator,
and the doors slid shut. The car plummeted sixty floors in absolute silence, the
digital floor counter blurring downward.
“Who is doing this?” Claire cried, tears streaming down her pale cheeks. “Vance
is in jail! Douglas is in jail! Who else wants to hurt my father?”
“The original founding trust,” Adrien said, his teeth grinding in fury as the
pieces violently clicked together in his mind. “If your father was the
forty-percent owner of the 1994 charter, he isn't just a victim, Claire. Under
corporate estate law, if I die, the company doesn't go to Douglas. It reverts to
the surviving founding partner—or his heir.”
Claire looked at him, her eyes wide with horrific realization.
“Douglas knew,” she breathed. “Douglas didn't just want to kill you. He needed
my father dead too, so there would be no competing claim to the primary voting
shares!”
“And Douglas had accomplices we haven't uncovered yet,” Adrien snarled as the
elevator doors chimed open into the dim underground garage.
Adrien’s personal armored sedan—a midnight-black Mercedes Maybach with
reinforced ballistic plating—was idling in the executive bay. Adrien hit the
remote unlock, thrust Claire into the passenger seat, and leaped behind the
wheel.
The twin-turbo engine roared to life with a ferocious growl. Adrien slammed the
transmission into gear, floored the accelerator, and tore through the garage
security gates, rubber smoking as the heavy sedan vaulted up the concrete ramp
and burst onto the crowded avenue.
Adrien flipped on the hidden emergency sirens behind the front grille. The car
blared with high-low wails, clearing traffic like a snowplow through winter
drifts.
“Nine minutes to St. Jude’s,” Adrien barked, weaving through the gridlocked
lunchtime traffic at eighty miles per hour. “Hold on!”
Claire held onto the dashboard handle, her heart pounding against her ribs like
a trapped bird.
Please God, she prayed silently, tears blurring the windshield ahead. Don't let
him die. He spent his whole life working in the dirt, suffering in silence,
never complaining about what was stolen from him. Let me save him. Please.
Four miles away, the peaceful fourth floor of St. Jude’s Neurological Pavilion
was in absolute chaos.
Alarms were shrilling from the central nurses' station. Blue strobe lights
flashed along the white-tiled corridors.
Inside Room 412, two men dressed in black paramedic uniforms were violently
rolling Thomas Bennett’s gurney toward the service elevator. Thomas was pale,
his eyes half-open, groaning weakly as one of the men held a syringe filled with
a milky sedative over his IV line.
“Hurry up!” the taller man barked, his radio crackling with static. “Blackwood’s
personal car just left the corporate tower. We have less than four minutes
before this entire district is locked down!”
“The old man is resisting,” the second man grunted, pinning Thomas’s trembling
arms down with a leather restraint strap.
Thomas looked up through his blurred, failing vision. With the last ounce of
strength in his worn, calloused machinist hands, he reached out and grabbed the
emergency oxygen line attached to the wall, yanking it with all his might.
The brass fitting snapped.
Pressurized medical oxygen hissed violently into the room, creating an
earsplitting whistle that echoed down the hallway.
“You stubborn old bastard!” the tall man cursed, raising his fist to strike
Thomas across the face.
CRASH!
The heavy double doors of the ward were kicked open so violently that the wooden
panels splintered against the drywall.
Adrien Blackwood stood in the doorway.
His coat was discarded. His sleeves were rolled up. His eyes burned with an
unholy, terrifying rage that froze both men where they stood.
Right behind him, Claire surged into the room.
“Dad!”
“Stop right there!” the tall man shouted, dropping the syringe and reaching
beneath his paramedic vest for a concealed weapon.
Adrien didn't give him the chance.
He closed the distance in three explosive strides, grabbing the heavy metal IV
pole beside the door and swinging it like a baseball bat.
The solid steel base smashed into the tall man’s ribs with a sickening crunch.
The man gasped, collapsing to the floor in a heap of agonized groans.
The second man lunged toward Claire, attempting to grab her as a hostage.
Claire didn't back down. Remembering the horror of the pier, she grabbed a heavy
glass water pitcher from the bedside table and shattered it across the
attacker’s face. The man stumbled backward, blinded by water and shards,
straight into Adrien’s waiting fist.
A single, devastating right hook sent the second kidnapper crashing over a
rolling medical cart, knocking him unconscious cold on the linoleum.
Claire threw herself onto the gurney, wrapping her arms around her father’s
chest.
“Dad! Dad! Can you hear me?”
Thomas blinked slowly, his breathing shallow, his trembling hand reaching up to
touch Claire’s cheek.
“Claire-bear...” he whispered raspy. “You... you brought the billionaire with
you again.”
Claire let out a sobbing laugh, burying her face in his hospital gown.
“I brought him, Dad. You’re safe. You’re safe now.”
Adrien knelt beside the bed, his chest heaving, his knuckles bruised and
bleeding. He looked at Thomas with an expression of profound, agonizing remorse.
“Mr. Bennett... Thomas... I didn't know,” Adrien said, his voice cracking with
raw emotion. “I swear to you on my mother’s grave, I didn't know what my father
did to you thirty years ago. I didn't know he stole this company from you.”
Thomas turned his head slowly, looking at Adrien. His weathered eyes held no
hatred, no desire for vengeance—only the deep, quiet wisdom of a man who had
made peace with suffering long ago.
“Your father was an ambitious man, Adrien,” Thomas murmured weakly. “He wanted
to conquer the world. I only wanted to build machines that worked. When he
pushed me out... I was angry for ten years. But anger is a poison you drink
hoping the other man will die.”
Thomas reached out his unsteady hand and placed it over Adrien’s bruised
knuckles.
“You aren't your father, son. Your father would have never walked into an alley
to save my daughter. He would have never bled on a hospital floor for an old
machinist. You are a better man than he ever was.”
Adrien’s eyes filled with tears. He bowed his head over Thomas’s hand, feeling
the crushing weight of his family’s sins begin to lift, replaced by a sacred
duty of redemption.
Outside, the sirens of thirty police cruisers wailed as the building was
surrounded by law enforcement.
Marcus hurried into the room, flanked by six armed Blackwood executive guards.
“Adrien! The police have secured the perimeter! The two men on the floor are
former operatives from Apex Asset Protection. But Adrien... that’s not the worst
of it.”
Adrien stood up, wiping his face, his expression turning to stone once more.
“What else, Marcus?”
Marcus held up his phone, showing a live encrypted video stream.
“The board of directors didn't call the emergency session this morning to
restore you,” Marcus said, his voice trembling with dread. “Julian Vance was
just a puppet. The real architect of the entire takeover... the person who hired
Apex, the person who signed the medical transfer order for Thomas Bennett...
just walked into the main boardroom at Blackwood Tower.”
Adrien’s eyes narrowed.
“Who is it?”
Marcus turned the screen toward Adrien.
Sitting at the head of the boardroom table, surrounded by six armed mercenaries,
was a woman in an elegant ivory suit, her silver hair pinned back with diamond
clips, sipping tea from a porcelain cup.
May you like
Adrien’s breath caught in his throat.
“Mother?”
