Chapter 20 - The Woman at the Top of the Stairs
The storm over Montauk had turned into a nor’easter by midnight.
Forty-eight hours after the burning of the *Sovereign of the Seas*, the rocky cliffs of the easternmost tip of Long Island were being battered by twenty-foot waves that sent sheets of white sea-foam crashing against the granite cliffs. The wind wailed like a chorus of dying souls through the skeletal iron beams of the old Montauk Point Lighthouse.
Elena stood at the base of the winding spiral staircase inside the historic stone tower.
Outside, five federal surveillance vans and a dozen tactical snipers were hidden in the coastal pine scrub, their thermal scopes trained on every window of the structure. Agent Miller had begged her not to go inside alone. He had pleaded with her to let the Hostage Rescue Team breach the compound.
But the text message that had arrived on Elena’s burner phone two hours ago had left no room for negotiations:
*‘Come up the stairs alone, Elena. Or the offshore tanker carrying four million gallons of crude oil into New York Harbor will detonate its ballast tanks against the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Let’s finish our wedding dance.’*
Elena took a breath of the cold, salt-drenched air that whistled through the stone embrasures. She wore dark jeans, heavy combat boots, and Julian’s heavy cashmere trench coat, her right hand buried deep in the pocket, gripping a snub-nosed .38 revolver Miller had secretly slipped her before she stepped past the perimeter tape.
She began to climb.
*Clang. Clang. Clang.*
Her boots echoed off the cast-iron steps. The spiral staircase seemed to rise forever into the dark, swirling heart of the storm. With every step, the scent of jasmine grew stronger, thicker, sickeningly sweet, battling against the stench of wet kelp and decaying fish washed up on the rocks below.
*Sixty steps. Eighty steps. One hundred steps.*
Elena reached the lantern room at the very apex of the lighthouse.
The massive, twelve-foot-tall glass lens rotated slowly in the center of the chamber, casting a brilliant, blinding beam of white light out into the churning, black void of the Atlantic every five seconds.
Standing on the outer observation gallery, silhouetted against the blinding beam of the lantern and the crashing waves below, was a figure.
She was wearing an emerald-green silk ballgown—the exact dress Victoria Montgomery had planned to wear to the wedding reception dinner. Over her shoulders was a mink stole, sodden with rain and ocean spray. Her silver-blonde hair was whipped wildly by the gale-force wind, but her back was perfectly straight, her hands resting calmly on the cold iron railing overlooking the abyss.
Elena stepped out onto the metal catwalk. The wind tore at her hair, driving needles of freezing rain into her face.
“Victoria,” Elena called out over the roar of the surf.
The woman slowly turned around.
The blinding beam of the lighthouse swept across her face.
Elena’s heart stopped.
The left side of Victoria Montgomery’s face was a horrific, puckered landscape of third-degree burns—the skin melted and fused, the left eye white and blind, the cheek pulled tight into a grotesque, permanent sneer of agony. But the right side of her face was as immaculate, as aristocratic, and as breathtakingly beautiful as the day she had greeted Elena at the rehearsal dinner.
In her right hand, Victoria held a heavy brass gaff hook—the very weapon she had wielded at the ladder of the *Sovereign*.
In her left hand, she held a small, black radio detonator with a single illuminated red toggle switch.
“You’re late for dinner, Elena,” Victoria said. Her voice was not human anymore; it was a ruined, gravelly rasp, damaged by the smoke of the engine room fire, but dripping with the same absolute, terrifying authority that had ruled an empire for half a century.
“Julian is in federal custody,” Elena said, stepping forward, keeping her hand locked inside her coat pocket. “Christian is dead. The FBI has the Swiss ledgers. Your empire is gone, Victoria. There is nowhere left for you to run.”
Victoria threw her head back and laughed—a sound so jagged, so full of manic, aristocratic madness that it was swallowed whole by the howling wind.
“Run?” Victoria hissed, her single good blue eye boring into Elena’s soul with demonic intensity. “A Montgomery never runs, you pathetic little peasant. You think this was about an empire? You think this was about thirty billion dollars?”
Victoria took a step closer, the brass hook dragging along the iron grating of the catwalk with a screech that set Elena’s teeth on edge.
“Julian was weak. Christian was stupid. Neither of them had the stomach to inherit what I built,” Victoria whispered, leaning in until Elena could smell the rotting flesh of her burned cheek mingled with the jasmine perfume. “I didn't choose Julian to marry you, Elena. I chose *you*.”
Elena froze, her hand tightening around the revolver. “What are you talking about?”
Victoria’s ruined face stretched into a smile so terrifying, so profoundly evil, that Elena felt the breath leave her body.
“Who do you think survived forty-eight minutes in freezing water with Tetrodotoxin in their veins?” Victoria whispered, reaching out with the tip of the gaff hook, gently resting the cold brass against Elena’s throat, right beneath her jawline. “Who do you think broke Julian’s jaw and put a bullet through my firstborn’s skull? Not a Montgomery. *You.*”
Victoria pressed the detonator into Elena’s left hand, closing Elena’s frozen fingers around the cold plastic grip.
“The tanker in the harbor is a lie, my dear,” Victoria purred into the freezing wind, her voice filled with a twisted, motherly pride. “This detonator doesn't trigger a bomb in the bay. It triggers the auxiliary charges planted beneath this very lighthouse. Beneath your feet. Beneath the snipers. Beneath everything.”
Victoria leaned closer, her blind eye weeping watery fluid in the rain.
“Kill me with that gun in your pocket, and Julian inherits everything through his legal trust. Let me flip this switch, and we both plunge into the dark together.”
Victoria slowly raised the brass hook high above Elena’s head, her ruined smile widening into a terrifying chasm.
“Or take the hook, Elena. Finish the job. Take my seat at the head of the table… and become the monster you were born to be.”
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Below them, through the iron grating, the red laser dots of a dozen sniper rifles appeared on Victoria’s chest.
And as the blinding white light of the lantern swept over them once more, Victoria Montgomery swung the hook down.
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