Chapter 37 - The Subterranean Arteries
"JUMP!" Nicholas screamed.
We were barely four feet above the maintenance landing on the seventy-second floor. Nicholas lunged out, grabbing my waist and violently yanking me off the ladder just as gravity took the grenade past us.
We hit the concrete landing in a tangle of limbs, sliding across the grease-covered floor.
Eleanor was still on the ladder above us.
"Nicholas!" Eleanor shrieked.
*BOOM.*
The detonation inside the confined vertical shaft was catastrophic. The shockwave blew out the landing doors, slamming Nicholas and me against the opposite brick wall. A blinding fireball erupted through the shaft, followed by a deafening roar of superheated air, shrapnel, and shattered concrete.
The ladder tore free from its moorings with a horrifying screech of twisting iron.
A figure tumbled through the smoke, crashing hard onto the landing beside us.
It was Eleanor.
The explosion had shredded the lower half of her dress, her legs horribly burned and lacerated by flying steel. She lay on her back, coughing up dark, frothy blood, her chest hitching in agonizing gasps.
"Eleanor!" I scrambled toward her, instinct overriding hatred. I pulled off my ruined jacket, pressing it against the worst of the shrapnel wounds on her thigh.
"Don't... don't bother, girl," Eleanor wheezed, her voice barely a rattle in her throat. She reached up with a blood-smeared hand, grabbing my collar with surprising strength, pulling my face down to hers. "Listen to me... Vivienne’s child... listen..."
"Save your breath, Mother," Nicholas said, kneeling beside us, his face blackened by soot, his eyes scanning the burning shaft above. "Elena will send men down the secondary stairs to confirm the kill."
"There is no... secondary bloodline..." Eleanor coughed, blood bubbling over her lips. "Elena isn't... Arthur’s daughter."
Nicholas froze. "What did you say?"
Eleanor let out a wet, rattling laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping across concrete. "Your father... Arthur... was sterile after the fever in sixty-eight. Nicholas... you were adopted from the orphanage in Vienna. And Elena... Elena was Julianne’s child... fathered by the cartel boss Arthur owed fifty million to."
The revelation hung in the smoke-choked air like a guillotine.
"Arthur never loved Elena," Eleanor whispered, her grip on my jacket tightening until her fingernails dug into my skin. "He hated her. That’s why... that’s why he created the cipher for Clara’s mother. Vivienne was his only real child, conceived before the fever. Clara... you are the only true Sterling left on this earth. The entire trust... is tied to your living breath. If you die... the assets don't revert to Elena. They revert... to the state."
Eleanor’s hand began to lose its strength, slipping from my lapel.
"The tunnel... beneath the freight elevator..." Eleanor’s eyes drifted toward the ceiling, glazing over as the life drained from them. "The train... the iron junction... don't let her... burn the city..."
Her head lolled to the side. Her chest stopped moving.
The Matriarch of Lake Forest, the woman who had ruled Chicago’s high society with an iron fist and cut my hair in cold blood, died on a filthy maintenance landing surrounded by grease and burning halon.
Nicholas stared at her body for two seconds. His expression was completely unreadable—an emotional void carved out by decades of betrayal and trauma.
"Nicholas..." I whispered, shaking. "She's dead."
"And we will be too if we stay here," Nicholas said, his voice flat, terrifyingly cold. He reached down, took the extra magazine from Julianne’s gun, and stood up. "Elena knows we survived. She won't stop until she has your head."
He pulled me up from the floor. My knees buckled, but he caught me, wrapping his arm around my waist to steady me.
"Can you run?" he asked, looking into my eyes.
May you like
I looked down at Eleanor’s lifeless body, then at the blood staining my hands—blood that belonged to the family that had hunted my mother to the grave.
"I can run," I said, my voice hardening into steel. "Lead the way."
