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 77 / 80

Chapter 77 - Fire Upon the Water

We drifted down into the black abyss, our electric drive running at silent dead-slow. Above us, the surface water was illuminated by the searchlights of six massive warships clustered like vultures over a dying carcass.

"Ten seconds," Julian murmured, staring at his tactical watch. Leo had buried his head in Julian's chest, his tiny hands clamped over his ears just as I had taught him.

"Hold onto something," I told them, locking my harness.

At five seconds, the *Valkyrie*’s reactor went critical.

The explosion above was not an ordinary blast. It was a cataclysmic rupture of superheated nuclear elements and stored torpedo munitions. Through the viewport, the dark ocean lit up in a blinding, incandescent white flash, turning the midnight sea into an amphitheater of violent, boiling light.

A split second later, the concussion wave struck our submersible.

The hull screamed as if crushed by the fist of an angry titan. We were thrown sideways; emergency red warning lights flickered on inside the cabin as the depth gauge spun wildly: *300 meters... 400 meters... 450 meters.*

"Ballast pumps failing!" Beatrice yelled, fighting the manual joystick as water sprayed from a fractured high-pressure valve overhead. "We're descending too fast! The trench will crush us!"

I lunged forward, ignoring the fire in my wounded arm, and grabbed the secondary auxiliary dive brake, hauling it back with all my weight. Metal groaned against metal. The hydraulic pumps shrieked in protest, but slowly, miraculously, the descent halted at five hundred and ten meters.

We hovered in the silent, freezing dark, surrounded by the echoes of destruction above.

On the acoustic sonar, the sound of tearing metal and cascading hull collapses reverberated through the ocean. The *Cerberus*, the pirate gunboats, and two of the surfaced submarines were being dragged down into the fathomless deep by the vortex of the blast. The entire armada sent to butcher my son had been wiped off the face of the earth in a single, righteous inferno.

In the dim red glow of the cabin, Leo lifted his head. "Mommy? Is the thunder over?"