Chapter 38 - The Steel Matriarch’s Throne Room
The bridge of the *Leviathan* did not look like the helm of a luxury vessel; it looked like the command center of a private warship.
Bank after bank of ultra-wide digital monitors glowed with satellite telemetry, surveillance feeds of the burning Montgomery estate, and continuous live financial readouts of European trading markets. The air smelled of ozone, expensive leather, and the heavy, sickly sweet vapor of Victoria’s continuous intravenous medication.
Victoria sat in the center of the bridge, her wheelchair locked into an automated docking clamp built directly into the deck floor.
Her sable coat was gone, replaced by a sterile surgical smock. Her mechanical lungs hissed with a steady, rhythmic cadence: *hiss-click, hiss-click.* She had plugged her medical console directly into the ship's main power grid, and a thick, clear tube ran from an automated pump on the chair into the port embedded beneath her left collarbone, cycling synthetic, oxygen-rich blood through her ravaged body.
Standing beside her, holding an ice pack against his blackened, burned shoulder, was Christian. He was screaming into a satellite phone, his face vein-streaked and purple with fury.
"...I don't care about the Coast Guard! Scramble the helicopter from the Southampton pad! We take the mother to the Swiss facility tonight, or I will start executing—"
"Hang up the phone, Christian," Elena said.
The voice was quiet, but it cut through the hum of the ship’s navigation computers like an electric shock.
Christian froze. Slowly, he lowered the phone from his ear.
At the bridge entrance, thirty feet away, Elena stood with her boots planted shoulder-width apart. The M4 carbine was leveled at Christian’s chest. Water dripped from her soaked clothing onto the polished teak floor, mixing with the soot and chemical residue covering her skin. Her face was calm, her breathing measured, her gaze locked onto the two monsters who had ruled her life for three years.
Behind her, Marcus stepped into the doorway, his weapon trained on the yacht’s two remaining navigation officers, who immediately raised their hands and backed away from their consoles.
Victoria didn't jump. She didn't gasp.
Slowly, the mechanized wheelchair pivoted on its steel base, turning the matriarch to face the girl she had tried to murder three times.
The mechanical eye zoomed with a tiny, high-pitched whir, focusing on Elena’s midsection.
"You look terrible, Elena," Victoria whispered through her speaker, a terrifying, grotesque mockery of a smile stretching the silicone side of her mouth. "The pregnancy is putting too much strain on your heart. Your vascular tone is elevated. I can hear the murmur from here."
"The baby is fine, Victoria," Elena said, taking one deliberate step forward. "Julian, however, is currently three miles south, running for his life with everything you thought you owned."
Christian snarled, taking a step toward Elena, but the crack of Marcus’s rifle firing a warning shot into the bulkhead six inches from Christian’s head pinned him to the spot.
"Julian is a coward," Victoria dismissed coldly, not even blinking at the gunshot. "He was born weak. He was always meant to be the donor, until you showed up with a pristine, uncorrupted genetic slate. Do you really think you've won, Elena? Look at the console behind me."
Elena didn't look away from Victoria’s eyes. "I don't care about your consoles."
"You should," Victoria sneered, her hand trembling slightly as she tapped the control screen on her armrest.
The main forward screen switched to a thermal imaging feed. It showed the Coast Guard cutter Julian was fleeing on.
Beneath the hull of the cutter, blinking in bright, neon-green digital tracking squares, were two autonomous torpedo drones, launched from the *Leviathan’s* subterranean wet-bay twenty minutes ago.
"Julian has the shell corporation passwords," Victoria whispered, her mechanical voice dropping into a register of pure, theatrical delight. "He thinks he escaped his mother. He thinks he outplayed his brother. But if my heart stops... if this monitor flatlines for more than sixty seconds... the acoustic triggers release."
Victoria tapped her own chest, right over the synthetic pacemaker embedded in her scarred flesh.
May you like
"Kill me, Elena," the monster whispered, leaning forward, her one human eye burning with demonic challenge. "Shoot me through my steel chest. Blow my brains across this bridge. And watch the father of your child get blown into fish food before his boat clears the bay."
***
