Chapter 100 - The Leviathan Awakes
"What’s happening?" Mia cried, jumping to her feet as the cabin floor shuddered beneath our boots.
"We’re being jammed!" Liam shouted, frantically trying to restore control to the flight navigation systems. "Not from below—from an orbital platform! Someone has seized remote telemetry of our avionics!"
Out the starboard windows, the thick gray cloud cover suddenly parted, illuminated by an eerie, blinding violet glare.
Hovering barely a kilometer off our wing, an enormous, unlisted stealth dreadnought—a war machine three times the size of any naval destroyer on earth—cruised silently through the stormy skies, defying aerodynamics with advanced electromagnetic propulsion. Its black hull bore the twin-headed serpent of the Apex Directorate.
Then, the central comm-screen on our war table flickered to life on its own.
A video feed stabilized. Sitting in a high-backed leather chair, dressed in an immaculate dark military tunic adorned with medals of a nation that officially ceased to exist decades ago, was a man whose face made the breath stop in my throat.
He had the exact same striking gray eyes as my children.
"Katherine," the man spoke, his voice deep, cultured, and resonant with effortless authority. "You have played Arthur's game with remarkable brutality. I expected nothing less from the woman who bore my grandchildren."
My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped beast. "Who are you?"
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The man smiled thinly, raising a crystal glass of amber liquid toward the screen. "Arthur Vance was merely my discarded bastard, Katherine. I am Julian Vance. The true architect of the Dynasty. And you have just flown directly into my kingdom."
Before I could speak, the warning sirens screamed deafeningly as our jet’s engines cut out completely, plummeting us into freefall toward the dark, churning waters below.
