Chapter 71 - The Ten-Billion-Dollar Target
The siren wailing through the command deck of the *Valkyrie* was deafening, its red emergency pulse bathing the steel walls in an ominous crimson glow. Leo clutched my neck with both arms, his tiny fingers tangled in my hair. His chest rose and fell against mine in rapid, terrified pants, his warm breath hitching with every screech of the perimeter alarms. Two years of agony, two years of searching across continents, and now my four-year-old boy was in my arms—alive, breathing, his bruised knees finally bandaged, but marked for death by the entire world.
"Ten billion dollars," Julian spat, wiping blood from his cheek with the back of his hand as he leaned heavily against the tactical console. "Every black-budget syndicate, pirate coalition, and rogue private military company from Murmansk to Gibraltar will be converging on our grid within twenty minutes. Brooke and the old man turned Leo’s biometric ledger into an automated dead-man’s switch. The second we severed the implant, the system flagged him as orphaned capital."
"He is not capital," I said, my voice dropping to a deadly, lethal calm. I kissed Leo’s temple, whispering into his soft hair until his trembling subsided. "He is my son. And anyone who comes to collect that bounty will drown in this ocean."
Beatrice was already typing furiously on the navigation terminal, her weathered face bathed in blue phosphorescence. "Six frigates flying unmarked black flags are approaching from the eastern quadrant. Three attack submarines are rising from the deep trench south of Dead Man’s Reef. Our engines took heavy flak during the storm. Clara, we cannot outrun them."
"Then we don't run," I replied. I laid Leo gently on the bunk in the reinforced bridge shelter, wrapping him in Julian’s heavy thermal jacket. I knelt before him, taking his small, bruised face between my hands. "Leo, look at Mommy."
His tear-glazed brown eyes locked onto mine. "Mommy, are they going to lock me in the doghouse again? The woman said I belonged in the dirt."
My heart shredded, but the pieces turned into raw, incandescent rage. "Never again, my brave boy. Look at me. Nobody will ever touch you. Nobody will ever put you in a cage. Mommy is going to build a wall around you that no monster on earth can cross. Close your ears and count the stars on the ceiling. Can you do that for me?"
He nodded, a brave, quivering sniffle escaping his lips. "One... two... three..."
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I stood up, racked the slide of my custom assault carbine, and locked the bulletproof blast doors of the shelter. Turning back to Julian and Beatrice, my eyes burned like molten lead. "Deploy the sea-mines along the starboard reef. Arm the torpedo bays. If they want the boy, they’ll have to step over every corpse on this warship."
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