Chapter 99 - The Traitor's Price
The little girl looked at me through eyes so identical to my own it was like staring into a mirror across a decade and a half of stolen time.
The same dark green irises. The same stubborn, high cheekbones. The same small scar above the left eyebrow—a birthmark of the Sterling bloodline that no laboratory could engineer away.
She didn't scream. She didn't flail. She had been taught, as I had been taught, that crying only made the monsters strike harder. She simply stared at me, trembling, tears carving clean trails through the dust on her pale cheeks.
"Drop the weapon, Emily," Vance said quietly. His pistol never wavered from the girl's temple.
His eyes were completely flat. There was no hatred in them, no malice. Just the terrifying, mechanical competence of a man who viewed human life as an entry on an offshore spreadsheet.
"You're making a mistake, Vance," I said, holding the MP5K leveled directly at his chest, refusing to lower the barrel. "The moment the child's biometrics verify the account, Eleanor has a kill-order already set for you. Check the auxiliary terminal on your left. Directive 12-B. The board never leaves surviving witnesses."
Vance didn't even blink. "Directive 12-B was rewritten three hours ago, Emily. I don't work for your mother."
Eleanor froze, her glass pausing inches from her lips. She turned her head slowly toward him, her patrician eyebrows drawing together in a sharp, dangerous line.
"What did you just say, Vance?" Eleanor demanded, her voice dropping into the haughty, razor-edged sneer she used on servants. "We had an agreement. Zurich pays into your Cayman accounts the second—"
"Zurich is gone, Eleanor," Vance interrupted, his voice brutally matter-of-fact. "Julian is dead. Your husband hung himself in his cell six hours ago."
Eleanor’s glass slipped from her fingers.
It hit the polished terrazzo floor with a crystalline shatter, scotch and ice splashing across the pristine cream fabric of her trousers. Her face drained of all color, the aristocratic arrogance stripping away to reveal the terrified, hollow creature beneath.
"Arthur... is dead?" she whispered, her voice cracking.
"He couldn't handle the isolation," Vance said without turning to look at her. "He broke. Just like Julian broke. This entire family was rotten from the root. Sarah Sterling knew it. That’s why she created the scuttle protocol. She never intended for any of you to inherit. Not you, Eleanor. Not Emily. Not the child."
"Then who are you working for?" I demanded, my finger tightening on the trigger slack.
A slow, humorless smile spread across Vance's scarred mouth.
"The Archon Council doesn't take orders from heirs, Emily. We manage them. And when an empire becomes too unstable to sustain itself, we harvest the core and bury the remnants. You brought the Sovereign drive with you, didn't you?"
He knew. He had tracked the download from Sanctuary Three.
"The drive is useless without the biometric verification," I said coldly.
May you like
"Which is why you're going to slide the drive across the floor to me," Vance said, his thumb resting lightly on the hammer of the gun pressed to my sister's head. "Or I blow this child's brains all over the glass, take the drive from your corpse, and reconstruct the genetic cipher from the tissue left on the floor. It takes six hours longer, but the math still works. Your choice, Emily. Be the monster they made you, or be the sister you never had."
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