Chapter 69 - The Frozen Precipice
Silence descended over the gorge—a heavy, suffocating silence broken only by the whistling Arctic wind through the skeletal bridge beams and the pinging of cooling metal.
Beneath us, three thousand feet of empty air dropped straight down into the raging, ice-choked river below.
The carriage was tilting forward at an ominous five-degree angle. Every tiny movement caused the heavy steel frame to creak against the rail lip.
"Nobody move," I whispered, barely daring to breathe. My boots were planted on the mahogany floor, my muscles locked tight.
Clara was frozen beside the brake wheel, Lily cradled beneath her left arm. The little girl's eyes were wide, staring through the shattered forward glass at the sheer drop ahead.
At the other end of the carriage, Cynthia Vance stirred.
"You think... you've won?" she wheezed, pulling herself up by the edge of the shattered conference table. Her silver hair had come completely undone, whipping wildly around her blood-smeared face in the icy draft entering through the broken windows.
Her movement shifted the center of gravity.
*GROAN.*
The carriage tilted forward another two inches. A shower of loose gravel and broken glass slid across the floor, tumbling over the lip into the void.
"Cynthia, stay still!" Clara warned, her voice razor-sharp. "The car won't hold!"
"Let it fall!" Cynthia shrieked, her mind entirely unhinged by the collapse of her empire. In her hand, she clutched a small, heavy steel lockbox she had dragged from beneath the desk. "The true sovereign seal is in this box! Without it, Lily can never claim the Vance estate! Without it, the council will declare the entire line extinct and dissolve the family fortune into the state treasury!"
She lunged toward the broken forward window, fully intending to hurl the lockbox into the three-thousand-foot chasm.
"No!" I shouted.
May you like
I lunged forward across the slick, tilting floor, tackling Cynthia around the waist just as her boots reached the shattered window frame. We slammed against the warped steel bulkhead. The impact was the final straw.
The rear wheels of the carriage lifted six inches off the rails with a shriek of tearing metal.
