Page 7 of Rescuing Ally: Part 2

“Sophia.” I stop mid-circuit. My voice comes out rougher than intended. I dial it back. “We need everything you can remember. Every detail.”

Blake gives me a warning look—Back off, she’s traumatized—but Sophia straightens, steel in her spine despite the tremor in her hands.

“It was Harrison.” The name is acid on her tongue. “It all happened so fast. He was at the door, claiming he had documents from Ally’s father.”

She strokes Luke’s hair mechanically as she speaks. The boy doesn’t stir.

“Max knew something was wrong right away. Started growling before Jenna even opened the door.” Her eyes go distant, replaying the memory. “When she cracked it open, Harrison reached for something inside his jacket. Max just—exploded. Went straight for his arm.”

“Good boy,” I mutter. Mental note: steak dinner for that dog when he wakes up.

“Then everything happened at once.” Sophia swallows hard. “Harrison screamed. Dropped a gun. Jenna shouted ‘Gun!’ and dove for it. His men outside started moving. Rebel yelled for me to get the kids to the safe room.”

Her hands tremble. Blake covers them with his own.

“That’s when I grabbed Luke and Zephyr. The last thing I saw was men in tactical gear rushing through the doorway and Jennaraising Harrison’s gun. Then there was gunfire, glass breaking… I got the kids to the panic room like Stitch taught us.”

“So you didn’t see what happened to Ally? The others?” Hank asks, materializing beside me. His voice is too controlled.

Dangerous.

Sophia shakes her head. “No. Once we were in the panic room, we could hear everything—the fighting, the shots, someone screaming. Then—silence.” Her voice breaks. “When it went quiet, we waited, like Stitch taught us. We stayed hidden until you came.”

“You did exactly right,” I tell her, the words scraping against my throat. “You saved the kids.”

“The bastards had a plan all along,” I snarl. The magnitude of Harrison’s betrayal is staggering—the man’s been Robert Collins’s head of security for decades. He watched Ally grow up.

Protected her.

And now?

I’ve never wanted to unmake someone as badly as I want to unmake Harrison.

“We need to see what happened after Sophia got to the safe room,” Hank says to Ethan, his voice flat. Deadly.

Ethan plugs a tablet into the wall display. The apartment’s security feed fills the screen—multiple angles, high-definition clarity, but views are limited to the hall.

It’s an incomplete picture.

I analyze it with a technician’s eye—cataloging weapons, tactics, vulnerabilities. The team moves like pros, but there’s something—off.

“Stop,” I say at one frame. “Go back fifteen seconds.”

Ethan rewinds.

“There…” I point. “Gas deployment pattern. That’s Guardian protocol. See the formation? The way they stack? That’s our standard breach procedure.”

The weight of this sinks in.

“These aren’t random mercenaries,” Hank says, following my thought. “Someone’s feeding Malfor our playbook.”

“Or he’s got more moles,” I mutter.

The footage continues. We watch Harrison enter first, the smooth deception as he approaches the door. The moment Max lunges, exactly as Sophia described. The gun falling. Then chaos erupts.

The hallway camera catches glimpses through the doorway—flashes of movement, Max latched onto Harrison’s arm, Jenna diving for the fallen weapon, then gunfire.

As the team floods in, we see what Sophia couldn’t. Rebel grabs a kitchen knife from the counter and slashes at the first operative to reach her, opening his arm from wrist to elbow. Malia flips the heavy dining table for cover. Ally—my chest tightens—swings a brass lamp at an attacker’s ribs. The impact drops him.