My parents sold everything to rescue my golden-child brother from a massive debt. Then, during a Level 5 blizzard, they crashed a van into the gates of my remote mountain resort. “We’re your parents. We’re moving in,” Dad demanded. He thought my life’s work was his “collateral.” He threatened to ruin my business if I didn’t help pay off the ruthless men hunting my brother. When I secretly opened the manila folder they brought, I realized they had brought something far more dangerous to my door.

"Thermite," I whispered to myself, the word tasting like ash in my mouth.

If they ignited thermite in the utility core, the fire wouldn't just burn the building; it would create a chimney effect through the ancient monastic flues, pulling superheated oxygen down into the subterranean crawlspaces and roasting everyone inside—including me, including my family—in less than ten minutes.

There was no more hiding in the ducts. No more tactical delays. The clock had just run out.

I kicked open the ventilation grate above the kitchen counters.

The heavy steel grate fell, crashing onto a stainless-steel prep table with a deafening bang. Before the two mercenaries in the kitchen could raise their weapons, I dropped through the ceiling opening, landing hard on my feet in a low crouch right on top of the prep table.

"She's here!" the welder shrieked, reaching for his sidearm.

I didn't give him the chance. I raised the Glock 19 and fired twice at point-blank range.

The heavy 9mm hollow-point rounds struck his tactical vest. The kinetic impact slammed him back against the commercial dishwashers, sending a tray of industrial glass crashing to the floor. The second mercenary lunged across the prep table, reaching for my legs to tackle me down.

I pivoted, swinging the heavy frame of the Glock violently sideways, smashing the steel slide directly into the side of his jaw.

His head snapped back with a wet crunch of breaking teeth. He stumbled backward, clutching his face, blood spurting through his fingers. I stepped forward, hooked my foot behind his knee, and slammed him down onto the frozen, slick tile floor. His head bounced off the edge of a steel stove unit, and he went completely limp.

I was breathing in short, ragged gasps, the cold air burning my throat, my injured shoulder screaming in pain.

Vance was no longer in the kitchen. He had already walked out into the corridor toward the utility core, leaving his men to handle the extraction.

I ran to the iron cellar door. The lock was red-hot, glowing faintly from the plasma torch attempt, smoking with burnt grease and insulation.

"Julian! Arthur!" I yelled, slamming my fist against the hot metal. "Can you hear me?!"

From inside, Arthur’s voice came back, muffled and terrified. "Eleanor! Eleanor, is that you?! They're blowing the door! Oh God, Eleanor, help us!"

"Listen to me carefully!" I shouted through the steel gap. "Vance is setting thermite charges in the utility core! In five minutes, this entire floor is going to be an inferno! The escape tunnel behind the wine rack—it’s not collapsed! I lied!"

Silence answered me from inside the cellar for a brief second.

"You... you lied?" Margaret’s voice wept from the gloom. "You left us in here to die?!"

"I lied so you wouldn't scramble down there like animals and jam the manual lock!" I barked back, my patience long gone. "The code to the hidden wine rack lock from your side is 1790! Punch it into the brass dial behind the third oak panel! The passage leads down to the lower creek shed! Run down the tunnel and do not stop until you hit the wooden outer doors!"

"What about you?!" Arthur called out, his voice cracking. "Eleanor, come with us!"

I looked down the dark corridor leading toward the grand hall, where a bright, flickering red glare was already beginning to reflect off the icy stone walls. The smell of burning magnesium and sulfur—the unmistakable, acrid stench of thermite—was pouring down the hallway.

Vance had lit the fuse.

"I have to put out the fire," I said softly, my voice barely audible over the roaring wind outside.

"Eleanor, you can't fight thermite!" Arthur shouted, his voice sounding genuinely frantic for the first time in my life—not frantic for Julian, not frantic for his money, but frantic for me. "It melts steel! Come down the tunnel! Let the damn building burn!"

I stood there in the freezing, dark kitchen, looking at the glowing red iron door.

"No, Dad," I said, a strange, quiet calm settling over my soul. "You gave up everything you owned to save what you loved. Now watch me save mine."

I turned my back on the cellar door and ran toward the flickering red glare in the grand hall.

Behind me, I heard the faint clack-clack-clack of the brass dial in the cellar as Arthur frantically punched in 1-7-9-0.

I burst out of the kitchen corridor into the grand hall, and the scene before me looked like a portrait of hell.

A blinding, violet-white flame was roaring in the center of the utility core alcove near the main fireplace. Thermite burned at four thousand degrees, eating through the heavy steel electrical conduits like wax, sending massive showers of white-hot sparks ten feet into the air. The intense heat was already melting the ice on the floor, turning it into boiling steam that billowed upward into the high timber rafters.

Standing twenty feet away from the blaze, illuminated by the apocalyptic white light, was Dominic Vance.

He had removed his trench coat. In his left hand, he held a secondary thermite grenade, ready to pull the pin and drop it into the main structural load-bearing timber beam that supported the grand hall's roof.

If that beam went, thirty tons of eighteenth-century stone and heavy oak would collapse inward, burying the entire core of the Obsidian Abbey under a mountain of rubble.

"Vance!" I roared, stepping out into the open space of the grand hall.

Vance turned slowly. The violet flare of the thermite painted his face in grotesque, sharp shadows. He looked at me, then at the empty Glock 19 in my right hand—its slide locked back, empty.

He smiled—a small, chilling curl of his lips.

"You're out of bullets, Eleanor," Vance said softly over the roaring hiss of the chemical fire.

"I don't need bullets," I said.

I raised my left hand. In it, I was holding the remote detonator for the Abbey's industrial roof-mounted avalanche mortar system—a high-pressure nitrogen gas cannon installed on the upper cliff directly above the grand hall to clear heavy snowdrifts before they could crush the roof.

During construction, the engineers had warned me: Never fire the nitrogen mortar if the structural integrity of the hall's outer glass is compromised. The sudden pressure differential will create an explosive implosion.

"What is that?" Vance asked, his eyes narrowing as he recognized the industrial yellow plastic casing in my hand.