Chapter 71 - The Shadow of the Black Sun
Julian’s face transformed from patrician arrogance into absolute, incandescent rage. "You little wretch!" he roared, lunging forward, his aristocratic composure entirely shattered.
Marcus didn't give him the chance. With a devastating tackle, Marcus slammed Julian against the side of a vintage roadster, the metal buckling under the impact as the silver detonator slipped from Julian’s fingers, skittering across the concrete floor toward my feet.
I brought my heel down onto the detonator with all the force in my body, smashing the delicate plastic casing and crushing the internal circuitry into useless fragments.
Julian struggled violently against Marcus’s iron grip, his coat torn, his gray hair wild across his forehead. He stared at the glowing red screens, his chest heaving with ragged, frantic breaths. "You don't understand what you’ve done!" he hissed, his voice trembling with an emotion I had never heard in a Vance: genuine, paralyzing fear. "You didn't just lock me out. You locked everyone out!"
The red screens suddenly blinked out, plunging the carriage house into near darkness, illuminated only by the faint auxiliary emergency lighting. Then, the central communications speaker crackled back to life.
It was not a satellite relay tone. It was a deep, resonant, rhythmic chime that echoed three times—low, metallic, and ancient.
Eleanor stepped back, her face turning ashen under the yellow emergency lamps. "No," she whispered, her hands flying to her mouth. "The Twelfth Protocol. That's not the family ledger."
Across the dark lake, through the shattered windows of the garage, the night sky over Geneva suddenly ignited with a pale, unnatural luminescence. A low, subterranean vibration shook the concrete beneath our boots, rattling the tools on the walls and sending ripples across the surface of the lake water.
On the dead console, a single green line of text materialized from an auxiliary hard-wired transponder that Julian hadn't brought with him—a line that had been waiting dormant inside the estate’s walls for half a century:
`THE BLACK SUN PROTOCOL HAS BEEN SUMMONED.`
`ARBITRATION TRIBUNAL EN ROUTE TO LAKE GENEVA.`
`ESTIMATED ARRIVAL: ELEVEN MINUTES.`
`ALL SURVIVING BLOODLINES SHALL BE MEASURED.`
May you like
Julian stopped fighting against Marcus. His body went limp, his eyes wide with a horror that transcended any human threat. He looked at me, then at Eleanor, and finally down at Maya and Leo.
"You fools," Julian whispered, the color completely drained from his lips as the distant sound of heavy, multi-rotor aircraft began to thrum through the Alpine peaks. "You thought Sterling & Cross answered to the twelve families. You didn't realize... we were only the keepers of the gate."
