195 I walked into our anniversary party with a man my husband had never met. He laughed in front of everyone and asked, / Chapter 46 / 86

Chapter 46 - The Lucin Crucible

The entire ten-thousand-ton train groaned as if the earth itself were splitting in two. The smell of burning brake composite and vaporized iron was suffocating. Up ahead, Julian Croft’s lead diesel engine shuddered violently, its wheels spinning uselessly against the tracks as the massive deadweight of the locked freight cars dragged its speed down from seventy miles an hour to forty... then thirty... then fifteen.

"It worked!" I cried out, my hands still locked with Jonah's against the icy railing.

"Not yet!" Jonah yelled, pointing toward the front cab.

Through the rear cab window of the lead diesel, Julian Croft himself emerged onto the rear walkway. He was dressed in an immaculate cashmere overcoat that fluttered violently in the wind, his silver hair swept back, his aristocratic face twisted into a mask of unbridled, aristocratic rage. In his right hand, he held a sleek black remote detonator with an illuminated red switch.

"You insolent, railroad trash!" Croft screamed across the five-foot gap between our platforms, his voice cracking with manic hatred. "You think you can drag me into a federal courtroom? I own the judges! I own the governor! I own the very ground this track was laid on!"

"Your ground is about to run out, Julian!" I shouted back, stepping to the very edge of the coupling plate, refusing to back down an inch. "Marcus is in Denver under federal custody, Evelyn is facing a lifetime behind bars, and your cartel reserves are in my possession. You have nowhere left to run!"

Croft’s eyes bulged with venomous spite. A cold, terrifying smile touched his lips.

"If I cannot have the western empire, Nina Taylor... then Thomas Ross’s son will bury you in it!"

Croft raised the black remote and flipped the protective plastic guard off the switch.

"Jonah!" I screamed.

Jonah leaped across the coupling gap with lethal speed, his boots clearing the churning void of track and water. His outstretched hand slammed into Croft’s wrist just as Croft’s thumb smashed down on the red detonator button.

A dull, subterranean tremor vibrated through the granite causeway beneath our feet.

Two miles ahead, the trestle pylons supporting the Promontory junction erupted in a sequence of orange fireballs, the massive timber bridges snapping like dry kindling and plunging into the black brine. The main line was severed.

Croft fought with the desperate, feral strength of a cornered rat, sinking his teeth into Jonah’s forearm while clawing at Jonah’s throat with his manicured fingers. "We're all dying out here, you bastard! The train is on a runaway dead-end grade!"

Jonah roared in cold fury, his forehead smashing down into Croft’s face in a brutal headbutt that broke the financier's nose and sent him crashing flat against the steel diamond plate, unconscious and bleeding profusely into the salt dust.

Jonah kicked the remote into the water, then grabbed Croft by his cashmere lapels, hauling the billionaire's limp body back across the coupling onto the platform where I stood.

"Mack!" Jonah bellowed back toward Engine 101. "Reverse full throttle! Reverse! The bridge ahead is gone!"

From behind us, Engine 101’s horn let out an ear-shattering, desperate blast. The sound of Mack throwing the massive locomotive into full reverse rang through the night, but the sheer momentum of forty thousand tons of steel was still carrying us forward toward the gaping, flaming abyss where the trestle had collapsed into the icy waters of the Great Salt Lake.

The cliff edge of the broken rail was less than two hundred yards away.

Jonah pulled me tight against his side, his arm locked around my waist like a vice, shielding me with his own body as the locked wheels screamed against the burning iron, sliding relentlessly toward the brink.