Chapter 72 - Sinking into the Iron Trench
The bullet chipped the reinforced concrete doorframe an inch from Elena’s cheek, spraying stinging fragments across her skin.
She threw herself into the service corridor just as a secondary explosion tore through the glass bastion behind them. A wall of freezing, pitch-black North Atlantic seawater smashed through the shattered panoramic panels, obliterating the obsidian consoles, the telemetry towers, and sweeping Alistair Montgomery’s shrieking form into the churning vortex.
"Close the pressure door!" Elena yelled, clutching the transport pod to her ribs.
Julian threw his entire body against the heavy pneumatic wheel of the emergency bulkhead. His muscles strained, veins bulging along his neck as the roaring torrent of salt water slammed against the opposing side. "It won't latch! The hydro-pressure is too high!"
"Use the lever, Julian! Kick the manual dog-lock!"
With a desperate cry of animal terror, Julian hoisted himself up and kicked the heavy forged-steel dog-lock down with his heel. The steel teeth engaged with an earth-shattering *CLANG*, cutting off the thundering flood. A fraction of a second later, thousands of tons of ocean water struck the exterior of the door, causing the three-inch solid steel barrier to buckle inward by half an inch.
Water hissed around the rubber gaskets, flooding the service corridor up to their shins in seconds.
"Where is she?" Julian panted, his chest heaving, his expensive tailored suit soaked in brackish scum. "Where is my mother?"
Elena didn't look back. "If she survived the blast, she’s swimming with the sharks she bought. Move!"
They sprinted down the steeply descending industrial gantry. The tunnel smelled of old rust, sulfuric battery acid, and stagnant bilge. Below them lay the private dry-dock carved into the bedrock—the umbilical tube that connected the subterranean fortress directly to the sub-surface pen where the *Montgomery Sovereign* had been secretly berthed for decades.
Through the iron grating beneath their feet, Elena could see the massive, curved black flank of the leviathan. It wasn't just a submarine; it was a mobile deep-sea command bunker, an engine of corporate apocalypse designed to survive a global financial or military collapse.
Suddenly, the red emergency klaxons overhead died, plunged into darkness. A second later, the auxiliary battery banks sputtered, bathing the corridor in an eerie, pulsing amber glow.
From the shadows near the access hatch of the docking gantry, a figure stepped forward.
It wasn't a guard. It was Victoria Montgomery.
Her designer gown was ripped to shreds, drenched in sea slime and stained with blood. Her hair was plastered across her skeletal skull like weeping willow branches. In her hand, she held a silenced Walter PPK, pointed dead at the glass dome where Maya lay.
"You really thought I’d drown in my own ocean?" Victoria whispered, her voice a dry, rattling hiss. Her jaw was clearly fractured, forcing her words through clenched, bloody teeth. "You ungrateful little gutter rat. You brought this ruin into my house."
"Put the gun down, Victoria," Elena said, stepping forward, using her own torso to completely shield the baby pod. "Your husband just admitted he replaced Julian's seed with his own. Your whole life has been a sick, hollow lie. You killed for a dynasty that was laughing at you behind closed doors."
Victoria’s hand twitched, her eyes widening with a madness so profound it seemed entirely alien. "A lie? The Montgomery name is not a lie! Julian is my son! The company is mine! Everything Alistair built, he built with *my* father's capital!"
She shifted the barrel toward Julian. "And you... you spineless, sterile disappointment. You let her shoot your father? You let her drag our name through the sewer?"
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Julian froze, staring at the woman who had dominated every second of his existence. "Mother... he stole my child. He made me a ghost in my own marriage."
"You were always a ghost!" Victoria shrieked. "Now get out of my way before I put a hole through that demon child's skull!"
