Chapter 48 - The Defiance of the Heir
The *Leviathan* tilted at a sickening thirty-degree angle. Heavy furniture broke loose, sliding across the polished floor and smashing against the bulkheads.
"Silas, the ship is going down!" I screamed, struggling to keep my footing while clutching Clara securely against my hip. "We have less than three minutes before the bridge floods!"
Arthur lunged again, grabbing his dropped revolver from the floor, his eyes wild with demonic madness. He aimed directly at me and Clara.
"If the dynasty ends, it ends in blood!" Arthur screamed.
Silas didn't hesitate. He tackled his father across the slick floor, both men crashing violently against the reinforced observation glass.
The glass, already stressed by gunfire and storm pressure, webbed with spider-veined fractures.
*Crack.*
A tiny jet of freezing Atlantic spray shot through the hairline fractures.
"Silas, get away from the glass!" I yelled, pulling Clara behind the steel anchor pillar near the blast doors.
Silas pinned Arthur to the fracturing pane, his combat knife pressed firmly against the patriarch’s throat. "It’s over, Arthur. Call off your offshore cells. Give me the abort codes for the secondary harbor strikes."
Arthur looked at his son, blood dripping from his chin, and let out a wet, rattling laugh. "There are no abort codes, Silas. The Consortium was never about me. It was never about Julian Thorne. Did you really think an old dock boss like me could build a shadow armada alone?"
Silas’s eyes narrowed. "What are you talking about?"
"I was just the harbor master, boy," Arthur whispered, his eyes gleaming with malicious delight. "The real architects sit in Zurich, in London, in Washington. They don't want an empire. They want total systemic collapse. And you just gave them the opening."
With a sudden, violent twist of his body, Arthur slammed the butt of his hidden backup pistol against the cracked glass directly behind his head.
The structural integrity vanished in an instant.
The entire six-ton sheet of reinforced glass blew inward under the crushing weight of a twenty-foot ocean wave!
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A torrential wall of freezing black water smashed into the observation deck, sweeping Silas and Arthur into the churning, flooded abyss!
***
