Chapter 3 - The Trap is Set
We needed to make them arrogant.
For the next four days, I played my part to perfection. I pretended to be careless, leaving my medical bag unlocked on the foyer table, dropping hints to Mrs. Gable about how overwhelmed I was, and complaining loudly in the kitchen that Jonah’s condition was deteriorating faster than the doctors expected.
It worked like a charm.
By Thursday night, the rats began to move.
I was supposedly off duty, sleeping in my room in the west wing. Instead, I sat in the dark of Jonah’s home office, wearing a dark hoodie, staring at the multi-feed security monitor connected to the mansion’s private intranet. Jonah sat beside me in his chair, his hands resting on his armrests, a heavy black-steel Colt M1911 resting silently in his lap.
At 2:14 AM, the office door clicked open.
A shadow slipped into the room. It wasn’t Mrs. Gable. It was Luca Moretti.
He moved with slick, silent confidence, walking straight over to Jonah’s safe behind the heavy mahogany bookshelf. He pulled a small digital decoding device from his jacket pocket and plugged it directly into the master override port.
“You always were too proud to delegate, boss,” Luca murmured to the empty room, thinking Jonah was asleep upstairs. “Should’ve handed over the keys a year ago. Instead, you kept fighting a war you already lost.”
“It’s hard to hand over keys when your hands are full of stolen goods, Luca,” Jonah’s voice cut through the darkness like a gunshot.
Luca froze. The color drained from his face as the desk lamps suddenly flared to life, illuminating the room.
Luca spun around, his hand flying toward his shoulder holster, but before his fingers could wrap around the grip of his pistol, I stepped out from the shadows behind the bookshelf and brought a heavy, lead-weighted medical clipboard crashing down across his wrist with the force of a swinging bat.
Luca screamed, dropping his gun as the bone fractured. He collapsed to his knees, clutching his mangled hand, glaring up at us with pure venom.
May you like
“You set me up,” Luca snarled, spitting blood onto the rug.
“You set yourself up the moment you thought a man in a wheelchair couldn’t still pull a trigger,” Jonah said coldly, rolling his chair forward until he towered over the sniveling traitor.
