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 75 / 80

Chapter 75 - Shadows of the Black Fleet

Beatrice stumbled through the breached doorway, her weapon smoking, her eyes wide as she took in the slaughter. She knelt beside Julian, pressing her fingers to his neck. "He’s alive. Severe concussion, but his pulse is strong."

"How bad is the ship?" I asked, panting as I wrapped a tourniquet around my punctured arm with my teeth and right hand.

"The engine room is flooding," Beatrice answered grimly. "We’ve taken on three feet of water in the lower hold. The *Cerberus* is preparing a second boarding party, and the three submarines have locked their acoustic torpedoes onto our signature. Clara, we have less than ten minutes before this vessel slips under the surface."

"What about the lifeboats?"

"They will be targeted the moment they hit the water. Ten billion dollars means no witnesses." Beatrice looked down at Leo, who had buried his face in my neck, trembling so violently his teeth chattered. "Unless we give them something bigger to look at."

I looked across the shattered bridge to the control console of the Sovereign Ledger interface. The screen was still blinking frantically with red code, tracing the child’s digital footprint that Brooke had maliciously uploaded to the dark net before her arrest.

"The signal," I said, a dangerous realization igniting in my mind. "They aren't tracking us. They're tracking the cryptographic heartbeat of the Ledger chip that was removed from Leo's skin."

"The chip is sitting in the biometric isolation unit right there," Beatrice pointed to a small glass canister humming on the steel table. "It's still pulsing on military frequencies."

"Then we don't need to fight them all," I said, a ferocious smile cutting through the blood on my face. "We feed the sharks their own bait."

Julian groaned, stirring awake on the floor. He blinked through the blood in his eyes and reached out to touch Leo’s small foot. "Clara... what's... what's the play?"

"We rig the *Valkyrie* to autopilot, set the reactor core to overload, and strap the chip to the main broadcast mast," I said coldly. "We take the stealth submersible tucked inside the auxiliary hull and dive beneath the thermal layer."

Beatrice stared at me in awe. "A phantom target. They’ll converge on the *Valkyrie* like hungry hyenas."