My Parents Skipped the Funeral of My Husband and Two Children for My Sister’s Birthday, but Six Months Later, One Headline Made Them Panic When They Discovered What I Had Done. / Chapter 113 / 121

Chapter 113 - The Ghost in the Glass

The Curator saw the hesitation in my eyes and made his move.

He didn't reach for a weapon; he reached for the dead-man switch mounted beneath the edge of the terminal desk. Even in his panic, the instinct of a bureaucrat was to incinerate the evidence.

I didn't think. Six months of survival in the shadows, of hunting offshore shell accounts and tracing black-market munitions through freezing Scandinavian ports, had stripped away whatever softness remained of the woman Mark Vance had married.

I pulled the trigger.

The suppressed report was a sharp, dull slap against the concrete walls. The 9mm hollow point punched through the Curator’s right kneecap. Julian shrieked—a high, bubbling shriek of agony—and collapsed against the desk, his hands clawing at the shredded denim of his trousers as bright arterial blood splattered across the white linoleum floor.

"That’s for my four-year-old’s empty coffin," I said, my voice dead and flat.

I stepped over him, ripping the hard drive enclosure from the server rack with my left hand and shoving it into my tactical rig. The intercom speaker crackled again.

"Still ruthless," Mark noted, a dark edge of amusement curling through the static. "I forgot how quickly you adapt when the adrenaline clears your head. Door thirty-four, Claire. Don't linger. Julian’s private security detail is thirty seconds out from the elevator shaft."

I didn't answer. I backed out of the antechamber, keeping my weapon raised toward the writhing figure of the Curator until the heavy magnetic seals hissed shut, locking him in the vault with his own bleeding flesh and the ruined fragments of his financial empire.

The corridor outside was bathed in the dull amber strobe of emergency lighting. Sirens thumped through the bulkheads like a dying pulse. I moved along the reinforced wall, my combat boots making no sound against the diamond-plate steel.

Thirty-four.

It was an airlock door at the end of the western concourse, stenciled with faded yellow maritime warnings. The digital pad beside the handle was already glowing green. The bypass had been executed remotely.

I placed my palm against the cold steel, took a ragged breath that burned my ribs, and pushed.

The room beyond was an observation gallery, cantilevered over a massive subterranean wet dock where the black waters of the fjord lapped against concrete pilings. Submersible hulls sat tethered in the shadows like sleeping leviathans.

Standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling reinforced glass, illuminated only by the faint green luminescence of tactical displays, was a man.

He was wearing a black wool sea-sweater, charcoal cargo pants, and combat boots. His shoulders were broad, slightly hunched in the familiar posture of a former marine engineer who spent too many hours hunched over blueprints. His dark hair was cut shorter than I remembered, threaded with fresh streaks of silver at the temples.