Chapter 17 - Blood Over Gold
“Get up, Evelyn,” I said quietly.
Evelyn blinked through her tears, trembling violently on the cold marble floor.
“I may share this woman’s blood,” I said, turning my eyes back onto Victoria, “but I was raised by David and Eleanor Montague. They taught me that honor is not something you buy in a Zurich boardroom. They taught me that a person’s worth is measured by what they endure, not by how many people they crush under their boots.”
Victoria smiled faintly, a dismissive, pitying curve of her lips. “Poetic, Claire. But poetry doesn't buy sovereign debt. Press the scanner.”
“No,” I said.
“Then you die here.” Victoria raised her hand to signal her men.
At that exact fraction of a second, Julian moved.
He didn't fire at Victoria’s guards. Instead, he spun on his heel and fired three heavy-caliber rounds directly into the subterranean Halon fire-suppression master conduit mounted on the ceiling behind us.
The pipe ruptured with an ear-shattering blast. Pressurized, non-toxic suppression gas erupted into the enclosed chamber in a blinding white storm, cutting visibility to absolute zero within a split second. The deafening hiss of escaping gas masked our footsteps as sirens screamed anew.
Gunfire ripped through the fog, deafening and erratic, but Victoria’s mercenaries were shooting blind into the marble pillars.
“Claire, left!” Julian roared through the blizzard of vapor, grabbing my wrist with iron fingers.
Therese was already moving, clutching the ancient ledger to her chest, her familiar knowledge of the sub-vault architecture serving as our lifeline. “The emergency sluice gates!” Therese shouted over the roar of the gas. “The drainage conduit leads straight to the Rhône canal!”
As I turned to run, a hand grabbed my ankle.
I looked down through the blinding white fog. It was Evelyn, sobbing, bleeding from a shrapnel cut on her temple. “Don’t leave me! Please, Claire, she’ll shoot me!”
For a fleeting second, the image of my father standing humiliated in that restaurant, wine dripping from his gray hair, flashed before my eyes. Evelyn deserved everything that was coming to her. She deserved the cold, merciless dark of the vault.
*“We do not become monsters to defeat monsters, Claire,”* David’s voice whispered in my memory.
May you like
I grabbed Evelyn’s collar with both hands and hoisted her to her feet with a surge of adrenaline. “Run, you idiot! Run!”
We bolted down the narrow maintenance tunnel as bullets pinged off the steel doorframe behind us. Behind the curtain of gas, Victoria’s furious scream cut through the sirens: “Seal the street exits! Do not let her reach the Federal Tribunal!”