Chapter 32 - The Ghost at the Door
"Drop the detonator, Richard," a familiar, breathless voice commanded from the entryway.
Richard froze mid-stride, his hand hovering inches from Sarah, his head snapping toward the entrance. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the federal marshals, looking pale, shivering violently in an oversized tactical jacket, but very much alive and out of cuffs, was Jonathan.
My grandson. The boy who had pushed my wheelchair into the freezing lake for eleven million dollars.
"Jonathan...?" Richard stared at him in utter disbelief, his arm dropping slowly to his side as the remote dangled uselessly from his trembling fingers. "You... you were supposed to be locked in the Minneapolis holding facility! How the hell did you get out?"
Jonathan didn't look at Richard. Instead, his hollow, haunted eyes slowly drifted down the center aisle until they landed on my wheelchair, parked beside Helen’s altar. Tears welled up in his eyes, freezing on his eyelashes as the cold wind whipped through the open chapel doors.
"They didn't just arrest us, Uncle Richard," Jonathan whispered, his voice cracking with deep, irrecoverable remorse. "Marcus Sterling... he sang like a canary the second the federal marshals offered him a reduced sentence. He told them everything about the offshore accounts, the bribes, the hit on Grandma... and about the trap you set up here on the mountain."
"You sold us out, you little coward!" Victoria screamed from the balcony above, raising her own small silver-plated revolver and pointing it directly down at Jonathan’s head. "You ruined everything!"
"Victoria, don't!" Richard shouted, taking a half-step back, but before Victoria could pull the trigger, Sarah’s sidearm barked once with a sharp, deafening crack.
The bullet struck the stone railing just inches from Victoria’s hand, sending a shower of sharp granite splinters flying into her face. She screamed, dropping the revolver as it clattered noisily against the stone floor of the balcony.
Simultaneously, three federal agents swarmed Richard, tackling him hard to the marble floor and pinning his arms behind his back before he could even twitch toward his detonator. The remote clattered away across the polished stones, sliding harmlessly into a dark corner beneath an empty wooden pew.
The red timer on the altar continued its relentless countdown: **00:15... 00:14... 00:13...**
"Evelyn!" Sarah yelled over the chaos, gripping my arm. "The timer! If we don't input the dual-founder signature right now, the system wipes everything—including the evidence against them!"
I looked down at Helen, whose breathing had grown shallow and weak on the altar. She looked up at me, giving a faint, almost imperceptible nod.
May you like
With a steady, unshakeable hand, I reached forward, pressed my thumb onto the biometric scanner beside Helen’s hand, and whispered the final command into the microphone as the timer hit zero.
A blinding flash of white light erupted from the computer screens, and the heavy iron doors of the chapel suddenly slammed shut on their own, plunging the entire sanctuary into a heavy, suffocating silence as the storm outside reached its deafening crescendo...
