Chapter 30 - The 80th Floor
The Chicago skyline loomed like a wall of darkened glass against the bruised, overcast morning.
We didn't arrive in limousines. We didn't arrive with security escorts. We arrived through the underground freight docks of the Sterling International Tower, dressed in stolen maintenance jumpsuits over our blood-spattered clothes.
The grand lobby eighty floors above was a cathedral of marble and silent power. Here, the world's most powerful financiers were gathering for the emergency vote Eleanor had called at dawn.
Nicholas bypassed the biometric elevator locks using his master security override—the one key Eleanor hadn't revoked because she believed he was still dead beneath the rubble of Lake Forest.
The elevator climbed in breathless, terrifying silence: floor 50... 60... 70... 80.
The doors slid open with a soft, aristocratic chime.
The boardroom was an expansive glass palace overlooking the frozen expanse of Lake Michigan. Around the fifty-foot mahogany table sat twelve of the most influential bankers and board members in the country.
And at the head of the table stood Eleanor Sterling.
She looked pristine. Her silver hair was immaculate; her charcoal Chanel suit was tailored to perfection. On the polished wood in front of her sat a high-tech optical scanner. And in her manicured hand, gleamed the platinum filament she had stripped from my severed braid.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Eleanor’s crisp, venomous voice resonated through the room. "With the tragic demise of my son and his unfortunate bride this morning, all ancestral claims dissolve. The sole authority of Sterling Consolidated returns—"
"Not quite, Eleanor," Nicholas said, walking out from the shadows of the vestibule, his gun held low at his side.
The silence that fell over the boardroom was suffocating.
Three board members gasped, scrambling out of their chairs. Eleanor froze. The color drained from her face until she was as white as marble, her eyes widening in genuine, unadulterated terror.
"Nicholas...?" she stammered, her voice trembling for the first time in her life.
May you like
And then I stepped out beside him, holding my weapon leveled straight at her chest, the jagged ends of my severed hair framing my blood-streaked face like a crown of thorns.
"You missed a strand, Mother," I whispered.
