I caught my husband kissing my older sister in my mother’s kitchen while twenty people celebrated my father’s sixty-fifth birthday in the next room. / Chapter 86 / 120

Chapter 86 - The White Descent

We burst through the French doors onto the frozen stone terrace, the sub-zero mountain wind slamming into us like a wall of ice. Snow was falling heavily now, blanketing the terraced gardens in blinding white sheets. Behind us, alarm sirens wailed through the pine trees, sending flocks of black rooks scattering into the iron-gray sky.

Two black security SUVs tore around the sweeping cobblestone driveway, their headlights cutting through the blinding blizzard.

"The funicular is blocked!" Liam shouted, checking the magazine of the captured weapon. "They're sealing the lower perimeter!"

"The service road along the bluff!" I pointed through the swirling whiteout toward a narrow gravel path cutting along the cliff face above the lake. "Julian said the estate’s wine cellars vent through the old avalanche barrier below the orchard!"

Footsteps pounded through the snow behind us. Gunfire chipped away at the balustrade, sending shards of stone grazing across my cheek. I felt the sharp sting of blood, hot against the freezing wind, but adrenaline surged through my veins, dulling every sensation except the raw imperative to survive.

We slid down the steep, icy embankment, clawing through the frozen brambles and snowdrifts until we hit the reinforced iron grate of the avalanche drainage tunnel. Liam slammed the butt of his weapon against the rusted padlock twice, three times, until the decayed shackle gave way.

We tumbled into the darkness of the mountain tunnel just as a heavy burst of automatic fire chewed through the pine branches above our heads.

The tunnel was damp, pitch-black, and smelled of subterranean wet earth and ancient iron. We ran blind, Liam's hand clamped tight around mine, following the downward slope of the mountain. In the distance ahead, the faint amber glow of Zurich’s municipal highway flickered through the ventilation slits.

My burner phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out with shaking, frozen fingers. It was an encrypted ping from Julian Harrow.

*“Federal prosecutors have breached the Paradeplatz offices. The Swiss Federal Police are en route to Villa Dolden with an arrest warrant for Geneviève de la Tour. Where are you?”*

"We're coming down the mountain," I texted back with numb thumbs. "Tell them to send the armored units to the Dolder Grand lower junction. She tried to execute us."

As we broke through the rusted drainage outlet onto the snowy verge of the highway, a black sedan with dimmed lights drifted to a halt beside the guardrail. The door swung open. Julian Harrow sat at the wheel, his face pale but determined.