Chapter 116 - Bloodlines of Ice
The revelation hung in the freezing air of the bunker like poisonous gas.
I sat back on my heels, the rusted iron key heavy in my fist. A sister. My mother had raised me under an iron rule of perfection, demanding absolute obedience, while my father drowned his guilt in scotch and corporate violence. But throughout my entire childhood, the master bedroom down the hall had kept one door locked—the nursery on the third floor of our estate that had supposedly been converted into storage before I was born.
*You looked too much like the sister they buried in the snow.*
"Vance," I said quietly, without looking at him. "When you pulled my father’s sealed records during the Zurich extraction, what was the date on the original trust?"
Vance leaned his head back against the concrete wall, his eyes narrowing as he dug through his memory. "Nineteen-ninety-four. Two years before your recorded birth."
"And the primary beneficiary before my name was entered?"
"A minor," Vance whispered, realization dawning in his pale face. "Sarah. Sarah Sterling. We assumed it was your grandmother’s namesake."
"No," I said, rising slowly to my feet. "It was their first child. The one they gave to the Archons to pay off the initial debt of the family firm."
My whole life had been a transaction. The beatings, the Thanksgiving dinner where my father had broken my jaw across the mahogany table while my mother watched with cold detachment—it wasn't just drunken rage. It was the desperate, rotting frustration of a man who had sacrificed his first daughter to a global syndicate, only to realize the syndicate owned him anyway. And every time he looked at me, he saw the child he had traded away for a seat at a table that was never his.
Suddenly, the bunker’s rusted iron door rattled violently.
Not from the wind.
A sharp, rhythmic cadence banged against the metal plate—three knocks, a pause, two knocks. The Archon administrative signal.
Vance was on his feet in an instant, his weapon raised, ignoring the tearing agony in his stitched flank. I shielded Clara behind me, drawing the compact semi-automatic pistol from my belt.
May you like
"Emily Sterling," a voice called through the door. It was neither synthetic nor mocking. It was gravelly, old, and weary. "You can pull the trigger when I walk through that frame, or you can take the snowcat hidden beneath the drift behind this shed and reach the port before the tide turns. The choice is yours."
The door creaked open an inch. A heavy, weathered hand in a grease-stained wool glove shoved a set of mechanical ignition keys through the gap, letting them drop into the snow with a dull clink.
