195 I walked into our anniversary party with a man my husband had never met. He laughed in front of everyone and asked, / Chapter 66 / 86

Chapter 66 - The Black Sunday Ambush

The Great Hall of the Chicago Board of Trade was an art-deco cathedral of limestone, brass, and towering murals depicting the harvest of the American continent. Beneath the forty-foot ceiling, three hundred institutional shareholders, foreign ambassadors, and rail barons sat in tense, suffocating silence.

At the head of the circular mahogany dais sat Lord Sterling Vance.

He looked older, his patrician face gaunt and waxen, but his eyes were black pools of venomous pride. Dressed in a bespoke three-piece charcoal suit, with his ivory cane resting across his knees, he looked like a deposed king preparing to pronounce judgment on the court that had condemned him.

The heavy double doors at the back of the chamber swung open.

The murmur in the room ceased instantly. Every eye turned toward the aisle.

I walked into the chamber with Jonah Ross at my side. I wore a tailored charcoal wool suit, sharply cut, with the golden locomotive pin of the Sovereign Trust pinned above my heart. Jonah walked a half-pace to my right, imposing and lethal in a dark tailored overcoat that concealed the heavy combat frame beneath, his cold, scanning gaze sweeping the high observation balconies with military precision.

Arthur followed behind us, carrying the leather-bound 1928 covenant under his arm like an executioner’s axe.

"Sterling Vance," I said, my voice echoing off the limestone walls with crystal clarity as we reached the center of the trading floor. "Your proxies have been invalidated by the federal bench in Chicago. Your emergency dispatch override in Calumet resulted in the arrest of Derek Taylor for federal treason. Stand down from that chair. This board belongs to the Ross-Taylor Sovereign Trust."

A low rustle passed through the assembly of shareholders. Several senior directors began rising from their seats, nodding toward me in silent capitulation.

Sterling Vance did not flinch. Slowly, deliberately, he raised his ivory cane and tapped it three times against the polished marble floor.

The sound was sharp as a gunshot.

From the four corners of the trading floor, the massive bronze emergency fire doors slammed shut with a deafening boom of pneumatic locks, cutting off the exits and trapping three hundred people inside the sealed chamber.

"Did you really believe, Eleanor’s bastard, that I would surrender an empire built across three generations to a girl who smells of coal smoke and a mercenary with blood on his boots?" Sterling spoke, his voice surprisingly strong, resonating through hidden acoustic speakers.

Jonah’s body instantly shifted into a protective wall, shielding me behind his broad frame, his hand dropping to his sidearm as his eyes snapped toward the high catwalks above the ceiling murals.

"Jonah," I whispered, my heart freezing. "Look at the ventilation grates."

A thick, yellowish-gray vapor began hissing through the high brass registers above the trading floor.

"Grandfather, stop this!" I commanded, stepping up beside Jonah. "There are three hundred innocent shareholders in this room!"

"There are no innocents on Wall Street, Nina," Sterling said, a horrifying, skeletal smile spreading across his pale lips as he rose slowly from his chair. He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a small, heavy black detonator with a single blinking crimson diode. "If I cannot hold the transcontinental artery, no one will. What lies beneath this floor isn't just grain manifests. The sub-basement of the Board of Trade houses the central pressurized natural gas mainline for the entire Loop district."

Panic erupted instantly. Men in five-thousand-dollar suits threw themselves against the sealed bronze doors, screaming in blind terror, pounding against the impenetrable metal with their bare fists.

"You're mad," Arthur gasped, clutching his chest as the pungent, suffocating smell of compressed gas began filling the cavernous hall. "You'll kill yourself!"

"I am eighty-four years old, Mr. Vance," Sterling whispered with terrifying serenity. "I was born a titan. I will die in the ashes of the modern world. And you, Nina... you will burn with me."

Sterling raised his thumb over the detonator switch.

"Jonah, the chandelier cable!" I screamed, spotting the high-tension steel winch anchored to the balcony pillar fifty feet above us.

Jonah didn't look at the stairs. He drew his Colt in a draw so fast the eye could barely track it. Three deafening gunshots shattered the vaulted ceiling, severing the heavy brass counterweight above the dais.

A two-ton art-deco chandelier dropped like a guillotine toward the chairman's podium.

Sterling shrieked, diving sideways onto the carpet as the crystal and iron crashed into the mahogany desk in an explosion of splinters and blinding dust. The detonator flew from his grip, skidding across the polished marble floor directly toward the edge of an open maintenance grate that dropped into the roaring darkness of the gas vault below.

"The switch!" Arthur shouted.

Jonah broke into a dead sprint across the slick marble floor. He dove forward, his arm outstretched toward the skidding detonator, his fingers brushing the cold plastic casing just inches from the edge of the pit.

At that exact second, from the shadowed catwalk high above, the crack of a sniper rifle echoed through the gas-filled room.

The heavy-caliber slug tore through the marble beside Jonah's shoulder, throwing up sharp fragments of stone. Jonah twisted violently, his hand snatching the detonator out of mid-air, but the sudden shift threw his balance over the precipice.

"Jonah!" I screamed, lunging across the floor, abandoning all caution as the hiss of the gas mainline rose into a deafening, high-pitched scream.

Jonah caught the lip of the steel grate with one hand, his body dangling over a fifty-foot drop into the darkness of the high-pressure gas chamber, while his other hand held the pulsing red detonator.

And from the shadows beneath the catwalk, a figure stepped into the dim light, racking the slide of an assault carbine, aiming the barrel straight down at Jonah's head.

It wasn't a mercenary.

It was Derek Taylor—escaped from the ambulance, his face half-covered in bloody bandages, his eyes burning with pure, homicidal madness, and his finger squeezing the trigger.

"Say goodbye to your hero, Nina!" Derek screamed.