Chapter 46 - Clara's Reckoning
I didn't move. I stood straight, wiping the blood from my brow with the back of my hand, staring down the barrel of my brother's gun.
"You think you won, Arthur?" I rasped, breathing heavily. "You think you can build an empire on the backs of two little girls who will grow up knowing you murdered their father?"
"History is written by the survivors, brother. In ten years, they will remember me as their savior."
He tightened his finger on the trigger.
*BANG.*
The gunshot wasn't from Arthur's weapon.
A high-caliber round tore through the shoulder of the mercenary standing to Arthur's right, spinning him around like a ragdoll.
Arthur whipped his head toward the shadows of the upper vault. Out from an elevated maintenance alcove stepped an older woman, her designer coat soaked in mud, her aristocratic face pale with vindictive fury.
It was Vivienne—the Matriarch.
She held a heavy hunting revolver in her shaking, arthritic hands, her knuckles raw and bloody where she had evidently broken free from the makeshift plastic restraints in the upper crypts.
"You arrogant little bastard," Vivienne hissed, cocking the massive hammer for a second shot. "You think you can discard me like an old chair? I built this syndicate with your father while you were still wetting your sheets!"
"You old fool," Arthur snarled, pivoting smoothly and firing two rapid shots.
The heavy bullets struck Vivienne in the chest. She gasped, dropping the revolver, her body tumbling over the iron railing and crashing into the bone stacks twenty feet below with a sickening crunch.
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The momentary distraction was all I needed.
I lunged forward, tackling Arthur around the waist with the full momentum of my body. We crashed into the stagnant pool of water covering the aqueduct threshold, splashing blinding, freezing sludge in all directions. Arthur's gun flew from his grip, clattering across the stones and slipping through an iron drainage grate into the abyss below.
