Chapter 29 - The Sacrifice on the Rails
The black SUVs had already breached the perimeter fence of the rail yard, tearing across the gravel tracks, kicking up stones and dirt.
My father rolled onto his back, looking up at the train pulling away from him. He saw me hanging over the railing, crying, screaming his name. And then he looked at the headlights bearing down on him thirty yards away.
He slowly smiled—a tired, resigned smile that broke my heart into a thousand pieces.
"Dad, get up! Nicholas, stop the train!" I begged, sobbing hysterically as Nicholas held me back by my waist to keep me from jumping.
"He can't make it, Clara," Nicholas whispered into my ear, his voice breaking with agony. "If we stop, we all die."
My father reached into his blood-soaked jacket and pulled out a heavy, military-grade detonator—the duplicate to the one he had used at the manor.
"Take the city, Clara!" my father's voice echoed through the encrypted radio on Julianne's collar. "Burn Eleanor's empire to the ground! Make her pay for every drop of blood!"
The lead SUV slammed on its brakes five feet from him. Operatives jumped out, raising their rifles.
My father pressed the red toggle.
He hadn't just booby-trapped the manor; he had wired the entire Calumet fuel depot adjacent to the rail line.
The explosion was monumental.
A wall of pure, boiling orange fire erupted behind us, rising two hundred feet into the Chicago morning sky. The shockwave slammed into the train, rattling the massive steel cars like toys and blowing a hurricane of superheated air over our heads. The four SUVs, the mercenaries, and the entire rail junction vanished in a roaring inferno of gasoline and burning steel.
I collapsed onto the catwalk, buried against Nicholas’s chest, weeping silently as the heat washed over my back.
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Julianne didn't shed a single tear. She wiped the soot from her cheek, checked the magazine of her weapon, and stared north along the tracks toward the distant, gray silhouette of the Chicago skyline.
"The Board meeting is at the Sterling Tower on Wacker Drive," Julianne said, her voice flat, cold, and utterly terrifying. "Nine o'clock. We have forty-two minutes to kill Eleanor Sterling."
