Chapter 33 - The Viper's Brood
The extraction was a blur of vertiginous acceleration and freezing air. The counter-weighted hoist snapped us upward through the shattered dome of the Palais de la Bourse, pulling us out of the suffocating smoke of the grand hall and into the black belly of the Parisian night.
Below us, muzzle flashes flickered across the square like angry fireflies. Two black armored SUVs had rammed the wrought-iron perimeter gates, their heavy machine guns tearing through the ornamental stonework of the facade. Julian had somehow secured a secondary tether just seconds after Eleanor grabbed me, his frame ascending twenty yards below us into the driving squall.
"He followed us," I yelled over the deafening roar of the storm and the straining electric winches.
"He wants the encryption drive," Eleanor shouted back, her grip on my harness unbreakable. "Julian Vance doesn't chase love, Clara. He chases leverage."
We cleared the roofline and dropped onto the flat gravel roof of an adjacent commercial building. Waiting for us beneath a camouflaged heat-shield tarp was an unmarked utility transport, its twin rotors idling in a low-frequency hum that vibrated through the soles of my combat boots.
The two operators dragged David Vance’s limp body across the gravel like a sack of scrap iron. Eleanor shoved me toward the sliding door of the cabin, but I turned and planted my feet against the skids.
"I am not getting into that aircraft until you tell me what Julian did," I said, the rain stinging my face. "You left me for dead for three years. You let me believe I was an orphan while Vance tore apart every studio, every loom, and every memory you left behind!"
Julian vaulted over the roof parapet, breathless, soaked to the bone, his coat torn along the shoulder where shrapnel had grazed him. He raised both hands, palm outward, though his sidearm remained tucked securely into his waistband.
"Clara, listen to me," he said, stepping through the howling downdraft of the rotors. "Three years ago, my father gave me an order. He wanted Eleanor Thorne wiped off the board because she was preparing to release the synthetic conductive weave to the open market. He told me to burn the atelier."
My stomach dropped into a bottomless void. "You set the fire?"
"I tipped her off!" Julian shouted, his voice cracking against the wind. "I called her forty minutes before the strike team arrived! I gave her the route to the train station in Montparnasse! The fire was already set by my father’s cleaning crew, but I ensured the building was empty!"
"You ensured my studio was turned to ash, you arrogant child," Eleanor snarled, stepping between Julian and the aircraft cabin, her rifle leveled straight at his chest. "You saved me only because you needed the secondary keys to the Lyon loom. You thought that if I died, the code would be lost forever. You kept me alive as an insurance policy against your father!"
"Is that true, Julian?" I asked, feeling an agonizing chill that had nothing to do with the freezing rain. "When you approached me after Sophia took the dress... when you gave me the security feeds from the bridal suite... was that an insurance policy too?"
Julian looked at me, and for the first time since I had met him in the high-stakes corridors of the luxury fashion underworld, he looked completely defenseless.
"Sophia was a pawn, Clara," he said quietly, stepping forward despite the rifle aimed at his heart. "My father offered her twenty million euros and a seat on the board of Vance Luxury Holdings if she wore the dress down the aisle. The gown contained the passive receiver for the transatlantic textile patents. If she completed the ceremony, the biometric transfer would have finalized the Vance monopoly for the next fifty years."
"And you let her walk down the aisle," I choked out. "You let my own sister humiliate me in front of hundreds of people."
"I gave you the USB drive with the security footage twenty minutes before the organ started playing!" Julian cried. "I knew what you would do with it. I knew you would burn the entire room to the ground rather than let her win! I needed you to break the ceremony from the inside, because legally, I couldn't touch my father's contracts!"
"You used me as a detonator," I said.
"I trusted your rage," Julian answered, his eyes burning into mine. "And I was right."
May you like
"Enough sentimentality," Eleanor snapped, racking the bolt of her rifle. "David’s strike teams are breaching the rooftop access stairs. Get in the transport, Clara. Or die here with your fiancé’s traitorous bloodline."
A heavy steel door on the roof blew outward with a deafening bang. Men in grey tactical uniforms flooded the gravel, opening fire without warning.
