Chapter 50 - The Glass Labyrinth
Martin looked from the screen back to me, the color completely drained from his face. The detonator in his hand felt suddenly useless, an empty toy that had failed to save him.
With a desperate, animalistic roar, Martin turned and hurled his entire weight against the balcony latch, throwing the glass door wide open into the freezing, howling Manhattan wind and rain.
"Martin, stop!" Tristan shouted, rushing toward the threshold.
Martin stumbled out onto the narrow terrace, sixty stories above the pavement, the rain lashing against his tailored suit. Behind him was the dizzying, sheer drop into the abyss of Madison Avenue.
"You took everything from me!" Martin screamed against the gale, clutching the balcony railing with one white-knuckled hand. "Arthur treated me like dirt! Evelyn treated me like a pawn! And now you children think you can rule the world?!"
"Step back inside, Martin," Ethan ordered, emerging onto the slick terrace with Tristan and me, moving with calculated, steady precision. "Give us Evelyn's extraction coordinates. Tell us where the submersible was taking her. Cooperate with federal prosecutors, and you might actually survive this."
A twisted, mocking grin spread across Martin's rain-soaked face. "You still don't understand, do you? Evelyn wasn't running away on that submarine. She was going to pick up the shipment."
My blood ran cold. "What shipment?"
"Arthur didn't just store papers in Geneva and New York," Martin laughed hysterically, the sound lost in the roaring wind. "He hid the Russian sovereign bearer bonds—the ones the Obsidian Council slaughtered forty people to acquire twenty years ago. The physical bonds are locked in a deep-water salvage vault off the coast of Montauk! Evelyn is already there! And once she retrieves them, she will buy an entire private army!"
Before Ethan could lunge forward to grab his collar, Martin's foot slipped on the rain-slicked marble tiles.
He didn't jump. He simply lost his balance.
With a strangled cry of terror, Martin flipped backward over the waist-high glass barrier, vanishing into the gray mist and rain.
A terrible, hollow silence hung over the wet terrace, punctuated only by the distant, muffled sirens echoing from the streets sixty stories below.
Tristan stood frozen, staring into the empty void where his uncle had stood a second before.
Ethan stepped to my side, his arm wrapping around my trembling shoulders, pulling me away from the ledge. "He gave us the location, Claire. Montauk. The deep-water vault."
"It's a trap," Tristan breathed, turning around, his face soaked with rain. "Evelyn knew Martin was weak. She fed him that information knowing he would break."
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"Trap or not," I said, wiping the rainwater from my eyes and looking at my newfound brother with unwavering determination, "it's where the serpent will die."
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