Chapter 29 - The Fortress by the Sea
Vivian shrieked as her balance vanished, her shot firing wildly into the ceiling plaster as she crashed heavily to the floor.
Julian didn't hesitate.
In a single, fluid explosion of motion, he dropped his shoulder and tackled the first armed contractor through the drywall into the hallway. The sound of splintering wood and hand-to-hand combat tore through the upper floor.
The second contractor swung his weapon toward Julian’s back.
I didn't think. The civilized, law-abiding woman who had spent four years playing by court rules evaporated. I grabbed the heavy brass table lamp from Maya’s nightstand, swung it with every ounce of maternal fury in my body, and smashed the solid marble base directly into the side of the operator's helmet.
The blow didn't knock him out, but it deflected his aim. The suppressed burst tore through the cedar closet doors behind us, filling the room with the smell of cordite and pulverized wood.
The contractor spun toward me, his gloved hand reaching for my throat.
*Crack!*
A deafening gunshot shook the room.
The contractor stiffened, his eyes rolling back into his head, and collapsed face-first onto the carpet.
Behind him stood Julian, holding the contractor’s dropped submachine gun, his face covered in blood from a gash across his forehead. He had already neutralized the first man in the hallway.
Vivian scrambled backward along the hallway floor, clutching her twisted ankle, her silver pistol lost in the struggle. She dragged herself toward the stairs, clutching the manila envelope and the vellum ledger against her chest.
"Julian!" I yelled, pulling Maya out of the bed and scooping her into my arms.
"Get downstairs!" Julian ordered, sweeping the hallway with the tactical weapon. "The generator lines outside have been cut, but the secondary emergency vehicle is in the carriage house! Move!"
We ran down the stairs, stepping over the shattered glass and splintered wood of the entrance hall. Grant was motionless on the bedroom floor upstairs; his eyes were staring blankly at the ceiling. The man who had terrorized my youth, who had cheated on me, humiliated me, and tried to strip me of everything, had died saving my daughter's life.
As we reached the great living room, a blast of sea wind tore through the open French doors.
Vivian was standing on the terrace outside, framed by the raging tempest, clutching the ledger to her chest as she backed toward the cliffside steps that led down to the private dock.
"Vivian, stop!" Julian shouted, raising the weapon as he stepped onto the stone patio, rain soaking through his shirt in an instant. "There’s nowhere to go! The bay is at high tide—a thirty-foot swell is breaking over the seawall!"
Vivian looked at us, her hair whipping violently across her face in the gale-force wind. Her eyes were completely crazed, burning with the manic obsession of a woman who had sacrificed her entire humanity for a piece of paper.
"I have the ledger!" she screamed over the roar of the Atlantic. "Without this ledger, you have no proof of the Singapore accounts! You have no proof of Marcus’s crimes! I will burn it in the engine room before I let you have it!"
"Vivian, look behind you!" I yelled, shielding Maya's face against my chest.
A massive, rogue wave—a towering wall of black water churned up by the nor'easter—rose twenty feet above the granite bluff, illuminated by a jagged streak of lightning that split the sky from horizon to horizon.
Vivian turned.
The look of sheer, paralyzing horror that crossed her face was the last thing I ever saw of her.
The ocean struck the bluff with the sound of a detonating bomb. A colossal surge of freezing seawater tore over the stone balustrade, smashing the heavy terrace furniture to splinters and sweeping Vivian off the ledge like a dry leaf.
She didn't even have time to scream.
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The Atlantic swallowed her whole, pulling her, the vellum ledger, and forty years of Sterling greed down into the churning, black abyss of the rocks below.
***
