Chapter 83 - Blood in the Torpedo Bay
The lower corridor of Sector Four smelled of copper, stale grease, and impending death. Elena ran through the dimly lit passageway, her boots kicking up sprays of brackish saltwater that had accumulated in the bilge.
Suddenly, a massive shockwave rocked the submarine, knocking her into the iron bulkhead. Her shoulder slammed hard against the rivets, pain lancing down her arm, but she instinctively twisted her torso to shield Maya from the impact.
"Elena..." a raspy, blood-choked voice hissed from the shadows ahead.
Elena spun, raising her weapon, her flashlight cutting through the gloom of the torpedo loading bay.
Propped against an empty torpedo rack, soaked in bilge water and bleeding profusely from a jagged wound on her temple, was Victoria Montgomery.
The once-untouchable matriarch looked like a drowned rat. Her manicured hands were shredded, her platinum hair clung to her skull in greasy clumps, and her custom-tailored silk dress was ripped to shreds. The emergency tube Elena had sealed her into had sustained an external hull rupture when the syndicate’s parasite sub docked, violently expelling Victoria into the lower deck instead of the open sea.
"You..." Elena breathed, her finger tightening on the trigger. "You survived."
Victoria looked up, coughing up pink froth, her eyes wild with a mixture of terror and venomous hatred. "Put... put the gun down, you stupid, low-born girl. You think I’m your enemy right now? Look at the transponder screens! Vance... Vance is here!"
"You sold us to him!" Elena snarled, stepping closer, the barrel of the gun leveled directly between Victoria’s eyes. "You tried to drown me off your yacht! You murdered your own son! You tried to steal my baby for your twisted family empire!"
"I didn't sell her to him, you fool!" Victoria wheezed, clutching her broken ribs as she dragged herself upright. "I borrowed five hundred million dollars from Vance’s shadow syndicate twenty years ago to build the Montgomery empire! The collateral... the collateral wasn't money, Elena. The collateral was the genetic line. The first female born of the direct bloodline carrying the ancestral Rh-null blood type!"
Elena felt the deck drop out from beneath her stomach. Her breath hitched. "Maya..."
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"Maya is the living key," Victoria whispered, her voice trembling with genuine horror. "Vance’s deep-sea vaults... the automated weapons grid beneath the Pacific... it can only be activated by the biometric sequence encoded in the child's genetic markers. If Vance takes her, he doesn't just take a baby. He takes control of thirty percent of the world’s maritime trade routes. And you and I... we are just dead flesh in his way."
Before Elena could answer, the heavy blast doors at the end of the torpedo bay buckled.
