Chapter 94 - A Mother's Final Treachery
I caught the pipe mid-swing, the impact vibrating through the bones of my forearm.
Eleanor snarled, completely unhinged, clawing at my face with her bloody fingernails. "You ungrateful little bastard! I raised you! I tolerated your father's cowardice and your grandfather's sickening condescension for decades! Everything that family built belonged to me by right! You stole my house! You stole my legacy!"
"You didn't build anything, Eleanor," I said, my voice dead and cold.
I twisted her wrist, ripping the pipe from her grasp, and shoved her back into the freezing torrent. She crashed against the reinforced glass of the viewport, gasping as the icy water swallowed her to the chest.
"You sold Grandpa to the men who poisoned him," I said, stepping toward her through the surge, my sidearm drawn, pointed directly at the bridge of her nose. "You signed the transfer orders. You let Croft into the estate."
"Julian, please!" she begged, sudden terror replacing her rage as she looked down the black barrel of my gun. "I was trapped! They threatened to kill me! Croft had files on everything—the shell corporations, the offshore accounts! I did it to protect us!"
"You did it for yourself," Richard’s weak voice cut in.
He was holding himself upright against an iron valve, his eyes burning with an indictment that thirty years of marriage had never witnessed. "You never loved Julian. You never loved me. Arthur saw through you the very first dinner you attended at Vance Ridge. He told me you were a vulture waiting for an old man to die."
Before Eleanor could scream another lie, the emergency siren switched tones. A computer voice, monotone and chillingly calm, announced:
**COOLING CORE RUPTURE IMMINENT. PRESSURE AT NINE THOUSAND P.S.I. INNER HATCH SEALS VENTING IN SIXTY SECONDS.**
The quartz viewport behind Eleanor cracked. A spiderweb of white fractures bloomed across the four-inch-thick synthetic glass under the monstrous pressure of the Atlantic trench.
"Julian!" Richard yelled. "The manual release! Under the grating! Now!"
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I didn't look at Eleanor again. I turned, took a deep breath of the freezing, toxic air, and dove headfirst into the swirling black water.
***
