Chapter 7 - The Grand Salon Standoff
The grand salon looked like a war zone of floating champagne flutes, broken crystal chandeliers, and overturned Italian furniture. The yacht was rolling violently against sixty-knot gale winds, the Atlantic Ocean rising outside the panoramic windows like liquid mountains of black glass.
Standing at the center of the tilted room, braced against the heavy marble bar, was Victoria Montgomery.
She had shed her soaked couture for a black tactical offshore sailing jacket. In her hands, resting casually across her forearm, was a heavy maritime flare gun—its orange barrel loaded with a phosphorus magnesium charge capable of burning through human bone at three thousand degrees.
Beside her stood Dr. Harrison, trembling like a leaf, clutching an emergency survival pack. Captain Miller was nowhere to be seen; he had likely already abandoned his post.
When the salon doors swung open and Julian stepped through, shielding Elena behind his body, Victoria didn't flinch. She simply smiled, that same venomous, terrifying smile she had worn on the swim platform.
“Julian, darling,” Victoria said, her voice amplified by the enclosed space. “You always were such a stubborn boy. Just like your father. He had this ridiculous, pathetic obsession with morality. And look where it got him.”
Julian took a slow step forward, his jaw clenched, his knuckles white around the heavy wrench. “You murdered Dad. Say it to my face, Victoria. Say it!”
Victoria rolled her eyes with aristocratic boredom. “Your father was going to divide the Montgomery fleet between three different charitable trusts and leave me with a paltry ten-million-dollar stipend. He was going to dismantle three generations of dynastic supremacy for the sake of his ‘conscience.’ I merely accelerated his natural decline. And now, you’ve brought this… this waitress, this common nobody into our bloodline, expecting me to sit back and watch you hand her the keys to my kingdom?”
“She is my wife!” Julian roared, his voice shaking the glass walls. “And you are a monster!”
“She was a mistake,” Victoria corrected smoothly, slowly raising the flare gun, aiming it directly at Elena’s forehead. “And mistakes are meant to be erased.”
“You shoot her, you have to shoot me!” Julian shouted, stepping directly into the line of fire, his chest heaving.
Victoria’s eyes narrowed into slits of serpentine cruelty. “Don't tempt me, Julian. You think I need you alive? The board respects me. With both of you lost at sea in a tragic, heroic attempt to save each other from a rogue wave, I become the sole executrix of the entire estate. The grief-stricken widow. The tragic mother. The richest woman in New York.”
She began to squeeze the trigger.
Behind Julian, Elena didn't cower. She had survived poverty, she had survived the icy depths of the Atlantic, and she wasn't going to die on the floor of a crooked billionaire’s floating palace.
Elena spotted the half-shattered magnum of Dom Pérignon rolling across the floor near her feet. Without a split second of hesitation, as Victoria’s finger tightened on the trigger, Elena kicked the heavy glass bottle with all her strength across the polished, tilted floor.
The bottle struck Dr. Harrison directly in the ankle. The terrified doctor panicked, lost his footing on the slick floor, and crashed violently into Victoria’s arm.
*BOOM!*
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The flare gun fired.
***
