Chapter 16 - Fractures in the Armor
"You brought Julian Cross into this?" Mason stepped forward, positioning his broad frame directly in front of Clara and me. His jaw was set, every muscle in his neck coiled like a steel spring.
Julian Cross stepped past Arthur, flicking an imaginary speck of dust from his camel-hair lapel. He was in his late forties, sharp-featured, with dead gray eyes that had terrorized boardrooms for two decades. "Arthur is a clumsy amateur, Mason. He needed liquidity; I provided it. He promised me the turbine patents in exchange for funding his legal siege. But frankly, I didn't realize Julian Vance kept such meticulous receipts."
"This is grand larceny and extortion, Cross," Clara shouted, holding her briefcase like a shield. "You’re an officer of several publicly traded boards. If you touch this ledger, you will spend the rest of your life in an orange jumpsuit alongside Grant Sterling."
Cross smiled—a dry, humorless smirk. "Lawyers always think the law moves faster than money. Who’s going to report it? An old vault master who can be bought for half a million dollars? A malfunctioning security camera?"
As if on cue, the security lights in the vault flickered and died, leaving the room illuminated only by the emergency amber bulbs near the floor.
"Take the book," Arthur commanded his two guards.
The larger of the two guards stepped toward Mason, his hand reaching inside his jacket.
Mason didn't wait.
With blinding speed, Mason lunged forward, catching the guard’s wrist before he could clear his holster, driving him backward into the wall of brass lockboxes with a deafening metallic crash. The second guard lunged for me, his gloved fingers reaching for the ledger tucked under my arm.
"Don't you dare touch her!" Owen’s voice didn't come from behind me—it came from my memories, but the fury that surged through me was entirely my own.
I swung the heavy leather-bound ledger with both hands, striking the second guard squarely across the bridge of his nose. The man stumbled back, cursing, blood spraying across his collar.
At that exact second, a deafening siren began to wail through the depository.
The heavy steel emergency gate of the vault began to grind downward, automatically descending toward the floor in response to the security alert Abernathy had triggered from his hidden control booth under the desk.
"Vault lockdown!" Clara screamed. "Mason, move!"
Mason threw the guard off him and lunged toward us, grabbing my coat and pulling Clara and me through the shrinking opening of the descending steel grille just as it slammed down with a bone-jarring *THUD*, sealing Arthur Vance, Julian Cross, and their two hired thugs inside the reinforced vault chamber.
Behind the heavy steel bars, Arthur beat his fists against the reinforced glass, his screams swallowed by the deafening roar of the bank’s security sirens.
We sprinted up the iron staircase, bursting through the lobby into the torrential Boston rain just as three police cruisers screeched to a halt at the curb, their sirens splitting the morning air.
I held the ledger tight against my chest, cold rainwater streaming down my face, washing away the dust of twenty years of lies.
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"Clara," I yelled through the howling wind and rain. "Call the federal prosecutor. We aren't just defending our company today. We’re taking Julian Cross’s entire empire down with Arthur."
***
