MY BILLIONAIRE EX THREW $30 AT ME WHEN I WAS PREGNANT AND SAID: "TAKE IT AND DISAPPEAR!" 10 YEARS LATER, I SAW HIM ON TV TELLING MILLIONS: "MY GREATEST REGRET IS THAT I NEVER HAD CHILDREN." I LOOKED AT THE 10-YEAR-OLD TWINS SLEEPING BESIDE ME—BOTH CARRYING HIS UNMISTAKABLE FACE—AND LAUGHED. THEN I TEXTED MY LAWYER: "GET THE INVITATIONS READY. WE'RE ATTENDING HIS COMPANY GALA." / Chapter 140 / 151

Chapter 140 - The Flight Through the Alps

The roar of the two high-output Yamaha snowmobiles cut through the silence of the alpine forest as we ascended into the high country above Annecy.

Marcus drove the lead machine with Noah strapped securely between his arms, while I drove the second, Sophie clutching my waist beneath my heavy thermal coat, her face buried into my back against the biting thirty-knot headwind.

Behind us, down in the valley basin, the orange glow of our burning front gates lit up the dark waters of the lake like an angry wound.

The temperature plummeted to negative fifteen Celsius as we climbed above the timberline. The trail was nothing more than a goat track—a narrow shelf of packed ice and granite hugging the vertical cliffs of the Semnoz massif. Below us, a sheer thousand-foot drop fell away into pitch blackness.

"Marcus!" I shouted through the helmet comms. "Where is the extraction point?!"

"Four miles north across the border ridge!" Marcus’s voice crackled through the static. "An abandoned French customs outpost from the Cold War! It has an underground bunker connecting to a decommissioned railway tunnel running straight through to Geneva!"

Suddenly, the sky above our heads vibrated with a low, bone-shattering thrum.

A twin-turbine Eurocopter 135 swept over the ridge, its high-powered searchlight cutting through the swirling snow like a laser beam, pinning our snowmobiles against the white mountainside.

"Attention snowmobile convoy!" a voice boomed through the helicopter's external loudspeaker in harsh, accented French. "Cut your engines immediately! Step away from the vehicles! The children belong to Lord Sterling!"

"They brought air support!" I yelled, swerving my machine around a massive boulder as the helicopter’s searchlight tracked our path.

From the open side door of the helicopter, the muzzle flash of a heavy machine gun illuminated the rotors.

THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD.

Heavy rounds tore through the snowbank three feet to our right, throwing up a blinding curtain of ice shrapnel.

"Duck, Sophie!" I screamed, leaning my entire body weight into the turn, feeling the snowmobile’s treads bite into the crust as we crested the ridge.

Marcus suddenly cut his throttle, sliding his snowmobile to a halt behind an outcropping of solid granite.

He jumped off the machine, unzipped his tactical backpack, and pulled out an olive-drab fiberglass tube: an FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missile launcher retrieved from our estate's underground emergency armory.

"Marcus, you can't fire that in a national park!" I gasped through the comms.

"I’m not firing it at the national park, Victoria," Marcus growled, hoisting the sixty-pound launcher onto his shoulder, flicking open the holographic sight. "I’m firing it at an unregistered corporate aircraft trying to murder my godchildren."