“No, you won’t,” Damon said, taking another step forward. “Because if you do, you have nothing to bargain with.”

“I have the syndicate,” she spat. “They won’t let you ruin them.”

“The syndicate is already falling,” Damon said. “We have the server data. And we have you.”

I reached into my pocket and slid the button on the recorder to the off position.

The red light went dark.

“It’s over, Elaine,” I said. “We recorded everything.”

Elaine’s eyes darted to me, then back to Damon, her face pale in the flashlight beam.

She realized, in that single second, that she had walked into a trap she couldn’t escape.

The sound of car tires crunching on the gravel outside broke the sudden silence.

But these were not the quiet, stealthy movements of Marcus’s SUV.

Several sets of headlights swept across the high windows, filling the room with a sudden, blinding glare.

The blue and red lights of emergency vehicles began to flash against the snow-covered glass.

A siren wailed in the distance, growing louder by the second.

Elaine’s eyes widened in panic as she looked toward the entrance.