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 73 / 121

Chapter 73 - The Blood Bargain

The runway at an abandoned airstrip near Innsbruck was nothing more than cracked tarmac dusted with early mountain snow.

We had landed under the cover of a false transponder code, piggybacking on the radar shadow of a commercial Austrian freight carrier. The twin-engine turboprop Ethan had secured through his old black-market network smelled of stale kerosene and hydraulic oil, but it had carried us over European airspace without triggering a single civilian alert.

The air outside bit through my tactical jacket like needles. It was minus four degrees, the sky heavy with the slate-grey promise of a blizzard.

Waiting beside a dilapidated hangar was a battered, matte-black Mercedes G-Wagon with Swiss diplomatic plates. Leaning against the hood was a tall, gaunt man in a heavy shearling coat, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.

"Viktor," Ethan said, stepping down from the plane's wing.

The man blew a thin plume of grey smoke into the freezing air and flicked the cigarette into the snow. "Ethan. You were supposed to be dead three times this year. Your obituary was printed in four languages."

"Rumors exaggerated by people who owed me money," Ethan replied, not smiling. "Did you secure the passage?"

Viktor’s eyes shifted past Ethan, landing directly on me. There was no warmth in his gaze, only the cold assessment of a man who traded in borders, contraband, and corpses. "This is her? The woman who erased the Meridian Fund in forty-eight hours?"

"My name is Claire Vance," I said, stepping into the space between them. "And every minute we spend exchanging resumes is a minute closer to forty hours. Do you have the route through the pass?"

Viktor let out a dry, rattling laugh. "The Bernina Pass is closed to civilian traffic due to an avalanche warning. Official Swiss border guards have pulled back to the lower valley checkpoints. Which means the only people operating up there right now are private security. Heavy armor, thermal drones, satellite sweeps. The facility at Mount Bernina—Sanatorium Corvatsch—is active. Helicopters have been landing on the summit pad since midnight."

"Who's arriving?" I demanded.

"The vultures," Viktor said, opening the rear door of the G-Wagon to reveal crates of cold-weather tactical gear, suppressed submachine guns, thermal-dampening cloaks, and high-yield shaped charges. "The auction isn't for investors, Mrs. Vance. Victoria's death triggered an automated liquidation clause in her private network. When the apex falls, her most sensitive assets are transferred to the highest bidder among her inner circle to cover her remaining debts."

My stomach tightened into a knot of hot iron. "They are selling my children."

"They are selling whatever is inside those children," Viktor corrected bluntly. "Your husband was the chief architect of the neural mapping protocols for the Geneva Bio-Tech consortium. Before his car went off that bridge, he encrypted his life's work using a biological key—a DNA sequence derived from his direct descendants. Without the boy and the girl, the decryption keys are useless. Victoria kept them alive in stasis because they were the only vault code that mattered."

I stared at the black crates in the back of the truck.

David hadn't just died in a car crash. He had tried to hide his life's work in the blood of our children to keep it away from Victoria's syndicate. And Arthur, our own flesh and blood, had sold them out for a promotion and a brown envelope.

"How many guards?" I asked, my voice calm, flat, and lethal.

"Fifty," Viktor said. "Ex-Swiss grenadiers, German PMCs. Automated perimeter turrets. And whoever is holding the gavel."

I reached into the crate, racked the bolt of an HK416 rifle, and locked a thirty-round magazine into the well. The sharp metallic *clack* echoed off the frozen tarmac.