Chapter 49 - The Final Verdict of Fire
The underground cavern groaned as a monster swell crashed against the exterior blast doors. Seawater surged over the concrete slipway, rising to Elena’s knees.
Christian tried to raise his weapon from the boat deck, but Julian racked the Benelli with a sickening *clack-clack* and fired.
A heavy slug tore through the stealth boat’s console, sending a shower of sparks into the dark. Christian was thrown back by the concussive blast, slamming his head against the engine cowling, unconscious.
Elena stood alone on the narrow concrete gantry between the boat and the two monsters who owned her life.
"Drop the gun, Mother," Julian commanded suddenly, his voice raspy and warped through his shredded cheek.
Victoria frowned, her pistol still aimed at Elena. "What did you say, Julian?"
Julian took two steps forward, his shotgun lowering—not toward Elena, but swiveling directly toward Victoria’s chest.
"I said, drop the gun, Mother," Julian whispered, a hideous, psychotic grin splitting his bloody face. "I've spent thirty-four years being your lapdog. Taking your beatings. Killing your rivals. Seducing the women you picked for me. But forty billion dollars doesn't need a grandmother. It only needs a father."
Victoria stared at her firstborn son, the absolute arrogance on her face finally cracking into disbelief. "Julian... I made you."
"And you can die knowing you made a killer," Julian sneered.
He pulled the trigger.
The 12-gauge blast hit Victoria Montgomery at point-blank range, lifting the matriarch off her feet and throwing her backward into the churning, black seawater of the submarine canal. Her body hit the freezing surge with a heavy splash, disappearing instantly beneath the frothing tide.
Julian didn't even watch her sink.
He racked the shotgun again, turning his one good, blood-crazed eye onto Elena.
"Just you and me now, darling," Julian whispered, stepping onto the metal gantry. "Just like our wedding night."
Elena didn't scream. She didn't beg.
All the fear she had carried since the deck of that yacht, all the terror of being hunted across oceans, burned away into a pure, crystalline fury.
"You're right, Julian," Elena said softly. "Just like our wedding night."
As Julian stepped onto the wet, metal grate directly above the boat’s mooring line, Elena reached into the pocket of her coat.
She didn't pull out a gun.
She pulled out the emergency flare pistol Christian had slipped into her pocket before they entered the house.
Julian sneered, raising the shotgun. "A flare? You think you can burn me before I take your head off?"
"No," Elena said. "I'm not aiming at you."
She lowered the flare gun and fired directly into the open, ruptured fuel intake of the stealth boat’s auxiliary gas tanks.
The white-phosphorus flare penetrated the fuel tank.
The explosion was instantaneous and cataclysmic.
A sixty-foot wall of liquid fire erupted beneath the gantry. The shockwave blew Elena backward onto the concrete dock, knocking the breath from her lungs.
Julian, caught directly above the blast center, shrieked as a vortex of fire consumed his coat, his hair, his flesh. The metal gantry buckled under the heat, collapsing into the boiling, burning sea.
Flaming and screaming, Julian tumbled headfirst into the inferno. He surfaced once, thrashing in the water, his arms reaching desperately for the iron ladder bolted to the pier wall.
The same ladder Elena had begged for on her wedding night.
Elena dragged herself to the edge of the dock. She looked down at him through the smoke and heat, her face illuminated by the dancing flames.
Julian looked up at her, his blistered, burning hands clawing at the lowest rung of the ladder. "Elena... please... the ladder... pull me up..."
Elena looked at him with eyes as cold and deep as the Atlantic.
She reached down, unlatched the heavy iron safety pin holding the ladder to the wall, and kicked the entire iron assembly free.
The ladder detached, falling into the black water.
"Drown," Elena whispered.
May you like
Julian screamed as the undertow seized him, pulling him beneath the flaming oil slick, down into the lightless depths of the Atlantic shelf.
***
