Chapter 40 - The Sovereign Throne
"Shut up and put your hands on the desk," Silas snarled, advancing with his weapon locked onto Thorne's chest. "Your teams at the diner are dead. Your private security downstairs is neutralized. You have nothing left."
Julian Thorne let out a dry, rattling laugh that turned into a wet cough. He reached into his suit pocket slowly. Silas thumbed the safety off, but Thorne didn't pull a weapon.
He pulled a small, silver remote control and pressed it.
On the massive digital wall behind Thorne, a live surveillance feed illuminated the dark penthouse.
My breath trapped in my throat, a scream catching like broken glass in my vocal cords.
The video feed was not of the city.
It was a real-time infrared feed of the Marcone Citadel—our secret, granite underground bunker sixty feet beneath the Manhattan bedrock. The reinforced blast doors had been bypassed cleanly, not blown open by explosives, but unlocked with an official master override code that only Silas possessed.
On the screen, two figures in tailored dark suits were standing inside Clara’s bedroom.
Clara was sitting up in bed, clutching her small stuffed rabbit, staring up at a tall, slender man whose face was obscured by the shadows of a wide-brimmed fedora. The man was gently offering her a gold pocket watch.
"You thought I was Clara's father?" Julian Thorne whispered, a demonic, triumphant smirk stretching across his dying face. "I am merely the Patriarch of the European branch, Major Marcone. Did you really think you were the only one with access to the Citadel's master keycodes?"
Silas’s face drained of every drop of color. His rifle barrel dipped an inch, his knuckles whitening as his entire body began to tremble with a horror worse than death.
"No..." Silas choked out, his voice cracking. "That’s impossible... He died twenty years ago..."
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"Blood always calls to blood, Silas," Thorne hissed softly, leaning back into his chair as the helicopter blades began to thunder outside the broken glass of the rooftop terrace above us. "Your father didn't perish in that dock fire. He built the Consortium. Clara doesn't belong to me, Silas. She belongs to the true King of Berth Nine—your father. And he has just brought your daughter home."
At that exact second, the feed on the wall cut out, the elevator behind us chimed with an incoming strike team, and the red alert lights of the skyscraper began to flash violently as the door to our trap snapped shut.
