Chapter 61 - The Firstborn of Obsidian
The cockpit radio crackled with static, but the voice cutting through the speaker was razor-sharp, stripped of human hesitation. It carried the exact resonance of Arthur Vance—the same icy cadence, the same absolute presumption of ownership—yet stripped of the old man’s physical decay.
"Boss, we have multiple radar locks," Alexander barked from the flight deck door, his knuckles white against the frame. "Two surface-to-air tracking radars from the coast, and those three gunships are matching our airspeed. If we bank hard, they’ll shred our turbines."
Maya’s fingers flew over her tablet, fighting the jamming signal bleeding into our avionics. "Mom, his transponder is registered to an unregistered private defense contractor operating under maritime sovereign immunity. His name... the encrypted birth registry calls him Tristan Vance. Born twenty-two years ago in a private surgical compound off the coast of Aberdeen."
"Tristan," I whispered, the name tasting like ash and iron on my tongue.
Beside me, eight-year-old Chloe pulled Leo against her chest. Leo had awakened, his wide, dark eyes darting toward the heavy composite windows where the black gunships hovered like mechanical vultures against the grey mist. Liam stood up, instinctively placing his body between his younger siblings and the windows. At just thirteen, his jaw had already set into an unbreakable line.
"He called us his brothers and sisters, Mom," Liam said, his voice dropping low. "Is he like Julian?"
"Julian was a counterfeit puppet raised on vanity," I said, my voice hardening as every drop of adrenaline consolidated into pure, crystalline resolve. "Whoever this boy is, Arthur didn't raise him to sit in ballrooms. He raised him in the dark."
I pressed the cockpit intercom button. "Captain, can we make Edinburgh airspace?"
"Negative, Mrs. Vance," the pilot replied, strain evident in his breath. "They’ve established an electronic perimeter. Ground control isn't responding—our comms are being looped back into their local transponder. If we don't alter heading three-zero-zero toward the coast, they will fire on our engines."
The radio flared to life again. The young man’s voice did not rise in anger; it remained terrifyingly level.
"Don't flatter yourself with evasive maneuvers, Katherine. Father spent forty years building a system of global leverage, and you thought tearing down a few European banks and putting Julian in a cell made you untouchable. You hold paper wealth. I hold the hardware that created it. Bring the jet down on Runway Zero-One, Sovereign Base Alpha. Do it now, or I will drop your starboard wing into the North Sea."
I looked down at my four children. For six years, Eleanor and Arthur had treated them like disposable dirt, offering me a twelve-million-dollar buyout to vanish into oblivion. I had turned that insult into an empire. I had broken Arthur’s heart, seized his vaults, and buried the Vance dynasty under the weight of its own greed.
I was not going to let Arthur’s ghost take my children from me at thirty thousand feet.
May you like
"Comply with the descent vector, Captain," I ordered into the intercom, my eyes fixed on the lead gunship. "Let him think he has us cornered. Maya, prepare the secondary cryptographic drive from Zurich. If this boy wants Arthur’s empire, we are going to show him exactly what it costs to take it."
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