Chapter 21 - The plunge into darkness
The world fractured into shards of wind and rain the second Clara’s boots left the balcony edge. Damien did not think. He did not hesitate. His body moved on sheer, unadulterated instinct, his boots skidding across the rain-slicked marble as he threw himself over the balustrade into the roaring void.
Lake Como churned two hundred feet below, black and violent against the jagged granite cliffs. But Clara was not falling to her death. A pressurized pneumatic tether hissed violently from the harness concealed beneath her carbon-weave coat, its titanium grapnel biting deep into the underbelly of the Black Sun gunship hovering fifty feet above the villa. The cable snapped taut with a deafening crack, yanking Clara and Lily upward into the howling vortex of rotor wash.
"Lily!" Damien roared, his voice torn away by the gale.
His fingers caught the trailing nylon deployment strap dangling beneath Clara’s harness. The violent jerk nearly dislocated his shoulder, the sheer G-force tearing the breath from his lungs as he swung through the icy torrent of rain, dangling between the stormy sky and the abyss. Rain pelted his face like needles. Above him, Lily’s terrified face peered through the downdraft, her hands reaching out through the storm.
"Daddy!" she screamed, her tiny fingers slipping on the wet strap. "Daddy, don't let go!"
"I'm here, baby! Look at me, look at Daddy!" Damien grit his teeth, the muscles in his forearms burning like liquid fire as he hauled himself upward hand over hand.
Clara looked down. In the blinding strobe of the gunship’s searchlights, her hazel eyes were completely devoid of warmth. There was no trace of the woman who had once fallen asleep on his chest by the fireplace, no trace of the gentle mother who had hummed lullabies in their sunlit nursery. She reached to her utility belt and drew a short, serrated combat blade.
"You should have let us go, Damien," Clara shouted down, her voice unnervingly steady over the scream of the turbine engines. "You don't understand what she is. You never did."
"She’s our daughter, Clara!" Damien snarled, lunging upward to grab the titanium ring of her harness. "What did they do to you? Look at me! Look at what you're doing!"
"I am saving her from the Hart bloodline," Clara whispered, and with one swift, brutal stroke, she slashed the nylon strap just inches above Damien's grip.
The nylon frayed, snapped, and whipped across Damien’s cheek. The bottom dropped out of his stomach. Gravity seized him with a vicious hand, dragging him down into the black abyss. As he plummeted backward through the storm, his vision locked onto Lily’s screaming face receding into the clouds.
Damien twisted his body in mid-air, ripping his emergency parachute cord. The pilot chute caught the crosswinds, violently snapping the silk canopy open barely eighty feet above the water. The deceleration hit him like a concrete wall. Before he could stabilize, the dark, freezing waters of Lake Como rose up and swallowed him whole.
The impact was deafening. Cold, suffocating pressure crushed his chest, driving the air from his lungs. Damien fought through the heavy drag of his soaked gear, kicking upward with every ounce of strength left in his veins until he broke the surface, gasping for air amidst the thrashing whitecaps.
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Above him, the twin afterburners of the stealth gunship flared crimson against the lightning, vanishing northward into the jagged peaks of the Swiss Alps. On the balcony far above, Marcus and his tactical team were firing flares into the night, their shouts drowned out by the thunder.
Damien floated in the freezing black water, his chest heaving, his fingers clawing at the empty air where his daughter had been. She was gone. Clara was alive, a ghost raised from the dead, and she had taken Lily into the lion’s den. Damien stared up into the stormy expanse, his knuckles turning white as his fury burned away the freezing chill. He would tear the continent apart stone by stone until he brought his little girl home.
