I came home after two years in Singapore and found my four-year-old son crawling on bruised knees while my husband’s mistress laughed and called him a little animal. / Chapter 69 / 80

Chapter 69 - Wrath of the Matriarch

The blast door sealed Julian on the other side. Through the thick glass, I saw him drop two advancing mercenaries before diving for cover behind a steel server rack.

"Hold on, Julian," I swore through gritted teeth, clutching the aluminum case to my chest as I turned and sprinted toward the maintenance shaft.

I moved through the bowels of *The Leviathan* like an avenging fury. Two guards tried to intercept me in the engine room corridor; I didn't stop. I fired my sidearm with surgical precision, dropping both with headshots before their bodies hit the metal grating, vaulting over their corpses without breaking stride.

Sirens wailed across the entire ship. A synthetic automated voice repeated over the loudspeakers: *CHIMERA SYNCHRONIZATION COUNTDOWN: SEVEN MINUTES. ALL CREW TO COMBAT STATIONS.*

I reached the exterior deck just as the hurricane hit its peak. Gale-force winds whipped torrential rain across the slippery iron plating. Lightning split the ink-black sky, illuminating our speed boat bobbing furiously fifty feet below against the hull.

"Clara!" Beatrice’s voice crackled through my comms. "The ship's secondary auto-cannons are locking onto your extraction craft! You need to jump!"

Before I could reach the railing, the bulkhead door behind me was kicked open. Director Vance himself stood in the doorway, drenched in rain, holding a high-caliber combat revolver leveled straight at my heart.

"You're not leaving this ship alive, Clara," he snarled, his tailored suit soaked, his refined mask slipping to reveal the rabid beast underneath. "Drop the case, or I'll execute the remote kill-switch right now and fry your son's brain from here!"

In his left hand, he held a sleek digital detonator with a glowing red button.

I didn't lower my weapon. I stood tall against the raging storm, rain plastering my hair to my face, my eyes burning into his with absolute, unyielding defiance.

"Do you know what Richard’s biggest mistake was, Uncle?" I asked, my voice rising clear and deadly over the howling wind.

Vance sneered. "Marrying you?"

"No," I replied, squeezing the trigger of my hidden sleeve-gun. "Thinking that a mother who survived hell to come back for her child would ever negotiate with a monster."

The hollow-point bullet tore through Vance’s wrist. The digital detonator flew from his severed grip, tumbling over the side into the churn of the black ocean. Vance shrieked in agony, clutching his shattered arm.

I closed the distance in a heartbeat, slamming the butt of my rifle violently into his jaw, dropping him onto the wet iron deck. I pressed the smoking barrel firmly between his eyes.

"This is for Leo," I whispered.

I pulled the trigger.