Chapter 415
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Chapter 415:
He stared at the retreating taillights, mouth hanging open. Cold, sharp panic pierced his chest. He frantically mashed his thumb against the red button — click, click, click, click — then slammed the detonator against the dirt, convinced the battery had died.
“No! No, no, no!” Viper hissed, his voice cracking into a hysterical growl.
Suddenly, the quiet, damp woods around him erupted into motion.
Bushes he had believed empty violently parted. More than a dozen men in heavy black tactical gear, Kevlar vests, and ballistic helmets materialized from the shadows.
𝘘𝘶a𝗅𝗂t𝘆 𝘵𝘳a𝗻𝗌𝗅𝗮𝗍𝗂о𝗻ѕ о𝗻 𝘨a𝘭ո𝗼𝗏е𝘭𝘀.сo𝗺
“Collins Security! Drop the device! Get on the ground!” a voice roared through a megaphone.
Viper froze. Dozens of red laser sights cut through the dim forest light, painting his chest and forehead with lethal dots.
His grip failed. The detonator slipped from his fingers and hit the mud.
Two heavily armored operators lunged forward. They seized Viper by the shoulders and drove his face into the wet earth. A heavy combat boot pressed between his shoulder blades, pinning him down, as cold steel handcuffs ratcheted tight around his wrists.
A man in a crisp black windbreaker bearing the Collins Group insignia walked slowly out of the tree line. He crouched down, used a pen to lift the detonator by its antenna, and dropped it into a clear evidence bag.
He looked at Viper’s mud-streaked, terrified face and let out a dry, mocking laugh.
“Did you honestly believe,” the unit commander said, “that your client could bribe the personal driver of a man who controls a hundred-billion-dollar empire without him finding out p>
One week earlier. Inside the dark, mahogany-paneled study of the Collins penthouse.
Old Chen was on his knees on the Persian rug, sobbing and shaking violently.
Gaston sat behind his desk and casually tossed a thick manila folder onto the floor. It fell open, spilling high-resolution photographs of Old Chen’s family in China alongside printouts of Aspen’s dark web cryptocurrency transfers.
“You have two choices, Chen,” Gaston said, his voice devoid of all mercy. “You die tonight, or you play along p>
Gaston had doubled the bribe money, relocated Chen’s entire family to a secure compound in Switzerland, and ordered his driver to follow the mercenary’s instructions to the letter.
The night Aspen believed the bomb was planted, Gaston’s private Explosive Ordnance Disposal team had carefully removed the C4, leaving only the empty plastic casing and the GPS tracker attached to the car’s undercarriage. And that morning, the vehicle Jocelyn and Gaston had stepped into was not the rigged car at all — it was a perfectly identical decoy, swapped inside the secure underground garage before dawn.
Lying in the mud, Viper absorbed the full weight of what the commander had said. The truth crashed down on him. Gaston Collins had constructed a flawless, invisible trap around Aspen Schneider — allowing her to orchestrate the hit from her jail cell, only to ensnare her hired gun and ensure she would face a conspiracy to commit murder charge on top of everything else.