A 4-Year-Old Girl Fell From a Million-Dollar Mansion’s Balcony Into an Infinity Pool! After the Servant Saved Her, She Kept Pointing Upstairs… But When He Saw Who Was Closing the Curtains, His Blood Ran Cold! / Chapter 26 / 60

Chapter 26 - The Child with Iron Eyes

The heavy .45-caliber handgun had kicked violently upward, its recoil knocking the four-year-old girl backward onto her seat in the mud.

Her tiny hands were trembling, scorched by the muzzle blast, but her hazel eyes were wide, unblinking, and cold. She did not drop the weapon. Her fingers remained locked around the checkered grip, her small index finger resting stubbornly on the trigger guard.

The remaining contractor—the one with the combat knife—stood frozen, his eyes darting between his dead partner and the tiny toddler sitting in the dirt holding a smoking firearm.

That split-second of shock was all Gabriel needed.

Roaring through the agony in his torn muscles, Gabriel surged forward from the ground like a leviathan. He closed the ten-foot distance before the mercenary could turn.

Gabriel’s left hand struck the man’s wrist, knocking the knife aside; his right hand formed an open-palm strike that slammed upward into the contractor’s nose with the force of a battering ram. The nasal bone splintered directly into the frontal lobe. The man collapsed into the mud without making another sound.

Silence crashed back over the canyon.

The only noise remaining was the crackle of burning aviation fuel floating across the black surface of the glacial lake, and the sound of Nora’s ragged, tiny breaths.

Gabriel staggered toward her, falling to his knees in the mud.

He didn't take the gun from her immediately. He knelt before her, his massive hands reaching out to gently cup her small, mud-splattered face.

"Nora..." his voice broke, raw and choked with an emotion he hadn't allowed himself to feel in a decade. "Nora, look at me."

Nora slowly turned her head. Her hands finally relaxed their death-grip on the heavy steel pistol. The gun dropped with a soft *thud* into the moss.

"I... I counted to sixty, Gabriel," she whispered, her voice trembling like a leaf in an autumn gale. "I counted to sixty... and then the bad man was going to hurt you."

Gabriel pulled her into his chest, wrapping his arms around her with a fierce, protective power that felt as unbreakable as bedrock. He buried his face into her damp, tangled curls.

"You saved me, little bird," Gabriel murmured against her hair. "You saved my life."

Nora’s arms wrapped around his neck, burying her face into his wet wool collar. For the first time since she had been shoved from the third-story balcony of the Ashford mansion into the infinity pool three weeks ago, she began to weep. The dam of shock had finally broken. She sobbed with the pure, agonizing heartbreak of an innocent child whose entire world had been burned to ashes.

Gabriel held her as the freezing mountain rain began to turn into thick, silent flakes of snow.

He knew they couldn't stay. The smoke from the burning helicopter would draw local authorities, forest rangers, and worse—the Ashford extraction teams.

He stood up, lifting Nora onto his hip, and retrieved his Kimber .45 from the moss. He wiped the mud from the slide, checked the chamber, and slid it back into his shoulder holster. From the dead contractors, he stripped two thermal survival blankets, a tactical compass, a satellite radio that hadn't been smashed, and two emergency medical rations.