My Husband Announced Our Divorce in Front of 300 Wealthy Guests and Introduced His Mistress as His Future Wife—Then I Signed One Name That Made His Mother’s Smile Disappear. / Chapter 79 / 130

Chapter 79 - Blood in the North Atlantic

"Leave him, Eleanor!" Julian pulled me toward the emergency evacuation shaft that led upward through the bedrock toward the secondary escape pod docks. "There's no saving him! The whole shelf is collapsing!"

"Alistair!" I screamed across the water.

My father turned his head. His tailored suit was soaked and ruined, his silver hair plastered to his skull. In the dim crimson emergency flashers, he looked like a drowned corpse already. He saw me standing on the threshold of the iron stairs with Julian.

For a single, fleeting second, the madness cleared from his eyes. He looked at me not as the Sovereign, not as the heir to an empire, but as the little girl who used to wait for him on the porch of the house in Maine.

"You really are your mother's daughter," he said, his voice barely audible over the rush of the sea.

He didn't try to climb the stairs. Instead, he reached into his pocket, pulled out the tarnished black iron ring with the three-headed serpent, and flung it with all his remaining strength across the churning black water.

The ring struck the iron grating at my feet, spinning until it came to rest against the toe of my boot.

A massive section of the basalt ceiling, weighing fifty tons, broke free with a sound like a thunderclap.

"Alistair!"

The granite slab crashed directly onto the center of the chamber, obliterating the pedestal, the obsidian table, and Alistair Whitaker beneath a mountain of prehistoric stone and crushing water.

"Move! Now!" Julian hauled me backward through the heavy hatch of the vertical access tunnel and slammed the manual seal shut just as a wall of water smashed against the observation glass.

We climbed through the shaking iron tube, every rung of the ladder vibrating with the death throes of the Obsidian Basin. Below us, the screams of the dying and the groans of the collapsing fortress were swallowed whole by the abyssal silence of the ocean.

Twenty minutes later, the emergency ascent capsule broke the surface of the North Atlantic.

The hatch blew open, and the freezing, crisp night air of the open sea hit my lungs like a shockwave. Overhead, the stars were cold and clean, indifferent to the monstrous empire that had just been buried five hundred meters beneath the waves.

A few hundred yards away, the lights of a Whitaker Maritime recovery vessel cut through the black ocean swells, their searchlights locking onto our bobbing capsule.

Julian pulled me up onto the rim of the capsule, wrapping his heavy wool tactical coat around my shivering shoulders. His arm was tight around me, his heartbeat steady against my cheek.

"It’s over, Eleanor," he murmured into my hair, his voice thick with exhaustion and relief. "The Eighth Vault is dead. The Vance name is buried. Arthur Sterling is gone. Alistair is gone. You won."

I looked down at my right hand. Closed tightly within my bruised, bleeding fingers was the black iron signet ring my father had thrown across the flooding crypt.