Chapter 74 - The Dutch Inlet
The icy cold was a living creature, clawing at my throat, crushing my lungs through the neoprene suit. For twenty minutes that felt like an eternity of sensory deprivation, we drifted beneath the chop, propelled only by small diver propulsion vehicles Marcus had stashed in the emergency sea chest.
When we finally surfaced between the reeds of a desolate salt marsh on the northern coast of the Netherlands, my limbs were shaking so violently I couldn't stand. I collapsed face-first into the cold mud, vomiting salt water and bile while the distant horizon behind us burned with the oily black smoke of our destroyed trawler.
Marcus crawled out beside me, tearing off his mask, blood dripping from his ears where the concussive pressure of the underwater blast had ruptured his eardrums. He collapsed on his back, staring up at the slate-gray European sky, his breathing ragged.
"They missed us," I gasped, my teeth chattering uncontrollably.
"They didn't miss," Marcus coughed, spitting crimson onto the gray marsh grass. "They miscalculated by fifty meters. But the drone sweeps will start within an hour. The Sovereign doesn't leave loose ends."
I rolled onto my side, clutching the waterproof pouch I had kept strapped to my chest through the entire swim. Inside was Eleanor’s cassette, the decoded dossier from Vault 404, and the handwritten birth registry stolen from Zurich.
"My mother," I whispered, the word tasting like venom. "All those years she watched him hit me. She watched Arthur drag me across the floor by my hair. She stood at the end of the dining table on Thanksgiving, watching my blood pool on her pristine white linen, and she told me I brought it on myself."
"Because you did, in her sick mind," Marcus said hoarsely, pulling himself up onto his elbows. "Every time Arthur looked at your eyes, he saw a man he was terrified of. Arthur was a mid-level money launderer who thought he was a king. Eleanor brought you into his house as a hostage to keep the Sovereign from exterminating the Sterling family. You weren't their daughter, Emily. You were their human shield."
I dug my fingernails into the frozen mud until the pain grounded me. "Then Arthur’s bankruptcy wasn't an accident."
"No," Marcus said, looking directly into my eyes with grim certainty. "Arthur started realizing you weren't his five years ago when your genetic profile popped during a routine corporate insurance screening. That's why he began draining your trust accounts. That's why he beat you harder. He was punishing you for the secret Eleanor kept in his bed."
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"Then where is she?" I demanded, the rage burning away the hypothermia. "Where did the black ops team take Eleanor after the Dover prison extraction?"
Marcus pulled a water-damaged field PDA from his tactical vest, tapping the shattered screen. "They didn't take her to a prison, Emily. They took her to the Croft ancestral estate in the Black Forest. To him."
