Chapter 49 - The Sterile Chamber
Richard stared at Eleanor, then at Marcus. His grip on the ivory cane tightened until his knuckles turned translucent white. The mechanical voice synthesizer let out a distorted, high-pitched screech as his breath hitched in pure, unadulterated madness.
*"All of it..."* the synthetic voice rasped. *"Thirty years of building a dynasty... on a bastard."*
"Dad, no! Don't listen to her! She's lying! She's trying to turn you against me!" Marcus wailed, thrashing wildly against the ropes, tears cutting clean channels through the grime on his cheeks.
"I don't need to lie, Marcus," I said, holding up a sleek, black military tablet. "Vault 404 contains the complete genetic catalog of Sarah Sterling’s direct lineage. Every trust document, every codicil, every offshore vault key was linked to maternal mitochondrial DNA. Grandfather didn't trust men. He knew Richard was a spineless parasite the day he met him."
I looked directly into Richard’s dead, furious eyes.
"Sarah Sterling designed this vault so that no man could ever steal it. You beat me for twenty-six years because I had my own mind, my own career, my own accounts. But the irony is, Richard... if you had treated me like a human being, if you had shown me even an ounce of decency, I would have handed you the keys to this entire mountain."
Richard raised the radio detonator, his wired jaw trembling with homicidal rage.
*"Then neither of us gets it,"* the synthesizer hissed. *"If the Sterling name dies tonight, you die with it, Emily."*
His thumb came down on the red trigger.
*Click.*
Nothing happened.
Marcus squeezed his eyes shut, screaming at the top of his lungs, expecting the explosion to tear him into red mist.
Silence. Only the sound of Marcus’s frantic, hyperventilating sobs echoed off the salt walls.
Richard looked down at the detonator in shock, his thumb slamming the button again and again. *"What... what did you do?"*
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From the darkness of the upper catwalk, Castiglione lowered a high-frequency tactical jammer.
"Did you really think," I said, closing the distance between us with slow, measured steps, "that after watching you manipulate contracts and threaten violence for twenty-six years, I would walk into this cavern without owning the frequency spectrum of the entire mountain?"
