Chapter 124 - Blood Across the Glass
"Stop her!" Arthur roared through the speakers, his voice losing its godlike detachment, replaced by raw, frantic fury. "Marian! If you want to live, kill Eleanor! Kill her and I will restore your Swiss accounts! I will give you the estate in Lake Como! Kill her!"
Marian looked up, her bloodshot eyes snapping toward Eleanor like a starved beast. The promise of survival, of wealth, of returning to the gilded cage she had inhabited for decades ignited the last dying embers of her feral nature. She snatched a heavy bronze sculpture of a falcon from the low table and lunged straight toward my back with a screech of unadulterated madness.
"Eleanor, behind you!" Helena yelled, still working frantically to pry open the heavy copper seal of the 1954 manual terminal.
I turned just as Marian brought the heavy bronze bird down toward my skull.
I didn't cower. I didn't flinch. Ten years of surviving exile, betrayal, and assassination attempts in the freezing cold of Maine had burned away any illusion of filial piety. As the metal descended, I stepped inside her arc, caught Marian's wrist with my left hand, and drove the heel of my right palm directly into her sternum.
The air blasted from Marian's lungs in a sickening gasp. The heavy bronze bird slipped from her grasp, crashing through the glass coffee table and sending crystalline shards scattering in every direction. Marian stumbled backward, her heels catching on the rug, and fell hard against the panoramic exterior window.
The impact sent a web of white stress cracks racing across the outer layer of the triple-glazed glass. Outside, lightning cleaved the Manhattan skyline in half, illuminating her terrified face in stark, violent violet.
"I gave you my youth," Marian gasped, clutching her bruised chest, blood trickling from a cut on her forehead where a flying glass shard had grazed her skin. "I gave you everything..."
"You gave me away," I said, looking down at her with neither pity nor anger, only the chilling finality of an executioner. "You handed Julian the pen and told him to sign the papers in front of three hundred people. You told me I was nothing without the Whitaker name."
A violent *CRUNCH* tore through the steel blast doors at the end of the private corridor. The hydraulic cutters of Arthur’s Praetorians were chewing through the four-inch titanium reinforcement. The smell of burning metal and ozone seeped into the office.
"Eleanor! The keyhole is cleared!" Helena shouted.
I turned away from my mother, walked over to the exposed pillar, and shoved the heavy 1954 bronze key into the ancient copper slot. The teeth bit into internal mechanical tumblers that had not moved in sixty years.
"Arthur," I spoke toward the ceiling, "you said I was the predator you bred. You were half right. But predators don't share their kills with dying parasites."
"Eleanor, don't!" Arthur’s voice cracked through the monitor, genuine panic finally breaking through his imperial veneer. "If you trip that mechanical override, the pneumatic pressure will flood Vault Zero with saltwater from the Hudson intake! It will destroy sixty years of physical records! It will destroy *me*!"
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"Then you shouldn't have built your crypt below sea level," I said.
I grabbed the heavy bronze key with both hands and wrenched it ninety degrees to the right.
