Chapter 19 - The Patriarch’s Fall
Vance raised his gold-headed cane, attempting to draw a concealed rapier from its shaft, but Gabriel was faster.
Gabriel’s right hand clamped onto the old man’s throat, lifting the billionaire patriarch clean off his feet and slamming him against the digital navigation consoles, shattering the LCD screens into a web of sparks.
"Where is the master key?" Gabriel growled, his grip tightening until Vance’s face turned a deep, suffocating purple.
Vance gasped, his manicured hands clawing at Gabriel’s steel fingers. "You... you don't understand what you’re interfering with, Mercer... Julianna wasn't an innocent mother... she was our chief researcher! She stole the formula to protect this worthless brat!"
"She protected her daughter," Gabriel snarled, leaning in until his scarred, bloodied face was inches from the oligarch’s ear. "Something your daughter never understood."
With his free hand, Gabriel ripped the encrypted titanium data drive from Vance’s inner coat pocket—the drive containing the entirety of the Caduceus cartel’s international infrastructure, government bribes, and secret holdings.
Down on the pier, the sound of federal sirens screamed closer. Vance’s empire was burning on the water, surrounded by coast guard patrol boats and harbor police closing the net.
Suddenly, a cold metal cylinder pressed against the base of Gabriel’s skull.
"Drop him, Mercer."
Victoria stood behind him, her face soaked in blood where her surgical stitches had torn open during the blast. Her emerald eyes burned with pure, homicidal madness. In her trembling, blistered hands, she held a heavy .45 caliber pistol pointed directly at Gabriel’s brain.
Nora, still strapped to Gabriel’s chest, turned her head.
She looked directly into the eyes of the stepmother who had tried to drown her, who had locked her in dark rooms, who had pushed her from the heights into the black water.
Nora didn't flinch.
Instead, the four-year-old girl reached out her hand, holding up the yellow satin ribbon that Gabriel had retrieved from the balcony bolts—the ribbon Victoria had tied to her hair the morning she threw her over the edge.
"Bad lady," Nora whispered clearly.
The sight of the ribbon—the proof of her crime, held by the child who refused to die—broke whatever shattered sanity remained in Victoria’s mind. She screamed in fury, shifting her aim toward the child.
In that microsecond of hesitation, Arthur Bennett hurled himself through the shattered bridge window.
Bloody, broken, and screaming like a wounded beast, Arthur tackled Victoria around the waist with the entire weight of his body.
"No!" Victoria shrieked as the gun discharged wild into the steel ceiling.
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The momentum carried both Arthur and Victoria over the severed bridge railing. Locked together in a fatal embrace of betrayal and vengeance, they plunged sixty feet downward through the smoke, past the burning deck, into the churning, prop-wash whirlpool of the harbor basin below.
A heavy splash echoed through the night. Then, the black waters of San Pedro swallowed them both.
