“Helipad on the Hay-Adams roof. Marine One support element cleared airspace through the National Capital Region two minutes ago. We have a three-minute window before the Potomac corridor closes.”
“Let’s move,” I said.
I turned my back on the ballroom.
I didn’t look at Tessa. I didn’t look at Grant, who was already stammering into his cell phone, his fingers trembling so hard he nearly dropped it. I didn’t look at the forty-two guests who had raised their glasses to my public execution only four minutes earlier.
As we reached the double doors, my mother’s voice cracked across the room, high-pitched, desperate, stripped of all its polished velvet.
“Elena! If you walk out of those doors, do not ever come back! Do you hear me? You are nothing without this family! Nothing!”
I didn’t pause.
We crossed the foyer. The elevator was already locked down, held open by a third security officer wearing a JSOC tactical vest over civilian clothes. We stepped inside. The doors closed, slicing away the Hay-Adams ballroom, slicing away twenty-eight years of conditional love, slicing away the lie that blood alone makes a home.
“Report, Reed,” I said the second the elevator began its high-speed ascent to the roof.
Jaxson Reed’s face hardened, the polite veneer of military courtesy dropping into the razor-sharp focus of an operator at war.
“The Chinese didn’t just breach the Seventh Fleet relay, ma’am,” Reed said, pulling a ruggedized tablet from his vest. “They bypassed the firewalls using an administrative backdoor coded into the Whitmore logistics software. Grant Whitmore’s firm left the key in an unsecured server in Singapore.”
He looked at me, his gray eyes cold.
“Our nuclear submarine communication network is going dark in forty minutes. The Secretary of Defense is on the airborne command post right now. He’s asking for you by name.”
***
