My husband told me he was closing a major deal in New York, but my brother found him at a Hawaiian resort

The gunshot shattered the subterranean silence with a deafening roar.

Vance swung his ebony cane upward in a lightning reflex—a reinforced titanium core inside the wood deflected Julian’s bullet into the marble ceiling, sending a shower of plaster rain down upon us.

"Take cover!" Julian shouted, diving across the floor and tackling me behind the heavy oak desk just as the mercenaries on the high catwalks opened fire.

A hail of high-caliber rounds shredded the mahogany surface above us, sending splintered wood and paper exploding through the air. Eleanor dropped to her knees beside me, her small automatic barking three rapid, synchronized shots. A mercenary shrieked from fifty feet above, plunging over the bronze balustrade and crashing through a glass display case below.

"The air filtration system is linked to the archive's primary fire suppression!" Eleanor yelled over the gunfire. "If we trip the halon gas protocols, the entire chamber will evacuate oxygen in sixty seconds!"

"We’ll suffocate!" Julian roared, reloading his clip.

"Only if we stay on the ground floor!" Eleanor replied, pulling a heavy brass master key from around her neck and pressing it into my hand. "The sub-level tunnel leads directly under the Corinth canal. There's a drainage conduit with an independent air supply. But the manual release is in the glass control room on the fourth tier!"

I looked upward through the flying debris. The fourth tier was an elevated glass booth suspended over the archive rotunda, reachable only by an open metal spiral staircase. Vance was already halfway up that staircase, escorted by two armored guards.

"He’s locking down the master cipher!" I realized. "If he secures the uplink, it won't matter if we escape—he’ll erase every identity we have and lock our accounts before we reach the coast."

"Julian, cover the stairs!" I yelled, pulling off my linen jacket and tying my hair back with a piece of shredded paper ribbon. "Mother, give me that pistol."

Eleanor’s eyes locked onto mine for a fraction of a second. There was no hesitation, no motherly condescension—only the cold recognition of an equal. She handed me the weapon. "Don't miss, Clara."

I broke into a sprint, weaving between the monolithic book towers as bullets sparked against the stone pillars behind me. Julian laid down a relentless stream of suppressive fire, his military background showing in every calculated, two-shot cadence that forced the mercenaries on the catwalks to duck behind steel bulkheads.

I reached the base of the spiral staircase just as Vance’s personal guard turned to fire downward.

I didn't stop. I fired two rounds through the perforated metal steps. The heavy slugs penetrated the steel grating, striking the guard in the thighs. He collapsed backward, tumbling down the spiral stairs directly toward me. I stepped aside, kicked his fallen rifle into the shadows, and charged upward.

The second guard rounded the landing at tier three. I threw the empty pistol directly at his face. The heavy steel struck him between the eyes, stunning him just long enough for me to close the distance. I grabbed his tactical vest, drove my knee into his groin, and used his momentum to hurdle him over the handrail into the darkness below.

I reached the glass citadel on tier four.

Inside the transparent control cube, Caspian Vance stood at the primary console, his hands flying across the holographic interfaces as billions of lines of financial code cascaded across the screens.

He heard the hatch swing open and turned, his silver wolf-head cane leveled directly at my heart.

"You are your mother’s daughter, Clara," he breathed, panting slightly, his composure fraying at the edges. "Violent. Uncontrollable. But you are too late. The uplink is at ninety-four percent. The Kensington charter is being transferred to my holding trust in Liechtenstein."

"You forgot one thing, Vance," I said, stepping slowly into the room, my breath coming in ragged gasps, blood trickling down my cheek from a flying splinter.