"There are no 'what-ifs'!" Luna snapped her head toward him, her voice shrill. "If you're scared, get the hell out! I don't need you. My father’s men and I will get it done! When I've tortured her enough and filmed her at her absolute lowest, I want to see how Lucian can keep playing the hero! I want to see how the Sampson family can keep calling themselves the wealthiest! I'm going to ruin them all!"
Gyrfalcon frowned but kept his mouth shut. His primary directive was to escort Luna out of the country safely, while accommodating her "additional requests" as much as possible. If he defied the young miss, it might jeopardize the extraction.
They spent the rest of the night running through every variable: vehicle models, disguises, exact timings, backup routes, the extraction sequence, and the underground rendezvous point. They didn't stop until dawn broke.
Over the next two days, the waters remained eerily calm. Loyce gracefully moved between her home, the company, and the hospital, managing her endless streams of paperwork and data.
Everything she did was exposed to potential surveillance, yet she seemed to be wrapped in an invisible shield of absolute security.
On the tenth day, at 5:35 PM.
The street behind Blossom Hospital.
Lucian was staring at a bank of monitors, speaking into his earpiece. "They’re making their move. My men are a block away, running real-time analyses on potential drop locations."
Across the city, traffic cameras subtly adjusted their angles.
The air was stiflingly hot. The prelude to the evening rush hour had already begun, and traffic was slowing to a crawl.
Loyce’s black armored SUV rolled out of the hospital's rear gate, her escort vehicles sticking to it like shadows.
Just as the convoy was about to turn onto the narrow bottleneck intersection leading to the main avenue, the ear-splitting screech of brakes and the agonizing crunch of metal shattered the air. A runaway box truck violently T-boned a garbage truck attempting a U-turn. Several civilian cars behind them failed to brake in time, resulting in a massive pileup. Shattered glass and twisted metal instantly barricaded the entire road.
Almost simultaneously, on the sidewalk near the rear of the convoy, two "elderly women" carrying groceries began screaming at each other. It escalated into shoving, and one of them let out a dramatic wail before collapsing to the ground, thrashing in an apparent seizure. The surrounding pedestrians gasped and crowded around.
The guards in the escort cars, right in the middle of their shift handover, instinctively snapped their attention toward the commotion.
Sitting in the back seat with her legs crossed, Loyce watched the chaos unfold. A faint smile touched her lips. Clever. They figured out the optimal extraction method I anticipated.
In that split second of distraction, a white ambulance with faded red crosses—but no hospital branding—silently pulled up alongside the right side of Loyce’s SUV.
Two figures dressed as paramedics, their faces obscured by surgical masks and caps, materialized like ghosts. One of them pressed a small, inconspicuous gray box against the lock of the armored door. Loyce heard a barely audible click, but she pretended to notice nothing, keeping her eyes fixed on the documents in her lap.

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