Chapter 14 - Blood on the Iron River
The Chicago River was a jagged spine of black ice cutting through the towering canyon of steel skyscrapers.
Snow fell in blinding sheets as Adrian’s strike team moved silently toward Navy Pier. The slip was quiet—too quiet. Moored at the furthest concrete pier, jutting out into the frozen, churning expanse of Lake Michigan, was *The Iron Empress*.
She was a monolithic, rusted relic of the Drake family's former shipping empire—a two-hundred-foot steel icebreaker that had sat dormant for over a decade. Tonight, however, her rusted deck was illuminated by halogen floodlights, and thick clouds of white steam billowed from her exhaust stacks.
Julian’s private security—at least twenty heavily armed mercenaries dressed in arctic camouflage—patrolled the gangway and the elevated bridge. On the aft deck, two massive industrial blending tanks were already hooked to thick pressurized hoses running directly over the railing, trailing toward the primary lake intake station barely two hundred yards offshore.
"Ten minutes to midnight," Adrian said through our tactical coms. He crouched beside me behind an abandoned shipping container on the frozen dock. "My snipers are in position on the lighthouse catwalk. Sophie, once the fireworks start, Julian will retreat into the command bridge or the lower laboratory where Clara is being held. That's our target."
"What about the intake hoses?" I asked, checking the magazine of my sidearm.
"My divers are already in the water with shaped charges. The tanks will never open into the lake," Adrian vowed. He looked down at me, his gloved hand reaching out to brush a stray lock of dark hair from my eyes. "Stay close. If I fall—"
"You're not falling, Voss," I interrupted, my voice steady as iron. "We finish this together."
A faint crack echoed across the harbor.
A split second later, the mercenary standing guard on the icebreaker's main gangway collapsed, a neat red hole punched through the center of his helmet.
"BREACH!" Adrian shouted.
Chaos erupted.
The sniper fire from the lighthouse opened up in a rhythmic, devastating barrage. Three more guards dropped before they could raise their assault rifles. The floodlights overhead shattered under precision fire, plunging the ship's deck into violent, strobing shadows.
Adrian lunged forward like a panther, his submachine gun barking in short, controlled bursts. Two guards rushed from behind a stack of cargo crates; Adrian cut them down without breaking stride, vaulting over the gangway and onto the steel deck of *The Iron Empress*.
I followed right on his heels. Adrenaline surged through my veins, sharpening my senses until the world slowed down.
A mercenary rounded the corner of the companionway, raising a shotgun directly toward Adrian's exposed flank.
I didn't think. I didn't blink. I raised my sidearm and pulled the trigger twice.
The double-tap struck the man squarely in the chest, the kinetic force slamming him back against the bulkhead before he collapsed into the snow. The smell of gunsmoke burned in my nostrils, sharp and intoxicating. I had taken a life to protect Adrian, and my hands didn't shake. Not even a little.
"Lower laboratory, down the hatch!" Adrian called out, tossing a flash-bang through an open steel hatchway leading into the vessel's hull.
*BANG.*
The deafening concussion blast rattled through the steel walls. Adrian leaped through the hatch, and I slid down the ladder behind him, entering the bowels of the ship.
The air here was warm and sterile, smelling overwhelmingly of antiseptic and chemical solvents. Fluorescent tubes hummed along the low ceilings. At the end of the long corridor stood a heavy blast door made of reinforced steel, fitted with a tempered glass observation panel.
Through the glass, I saw her.
Clara was strapped to a raised steel gurney, surrounded by sophisticated centrifuge machines and plastic blood collection bags. She was conscious, her pale eyes wide with terror, struggling feebly against the leather restraints.
Standing beside her, holding a surgical syringe filled with a shimmering amber compound, was a tall, elegant man dressed in a charcoal cashmere coat, his silver hair neatly combed back.
Julian Sterling.
He looked up at the sound of our boots, a smooth, patronizing smile curling over his handsome, aristocratic face.
May you like
"Right on time, Sophie," Julian’s voice purred through the laboratory’s intercom speaker. "Come in, darling. Let father show you what true legacy looks like."
***