My stepmother thought I was broke, so she treated me like her personal baggage handler and laughed as she sent me to Economy / Chapter 16 / 53

Chapter 16 - The Stepmother’s Gambit

My grip tightened on the phone until the casing creaked. "Victoria."

"You always were such a hopelessly sentimental little girl," my stepmother said, her voice dripping with venomous mockery. "Did you honestly believe your pathetic father had the spine to survive six years in exile? That voice you heard was a proprietary voice-synthesis model, generated straight from the Northstar security archives. We needed you to pull that key out of hiding, Emily. And you walked right into the trap."

"You don't have the vault," I said, keeping my tone ice-cold despite the violent tremor running down my spine. "You don't have the codes, and you don't have the key. You have Dominic in federal custody and an army of mercenaries who just failed to kill me."

Victoria laughed, a brittle, shrill sound. "Dominic is a foot soldier. Disposable baggage, just like you were at the terminal. While you were playing commando in the woods of Maine, the emergency board of Northstar convened in Zurich. By unanimous vote, using the proxy powers your father signed over before his tragic 'death,' I have been named interim Sovereign Trustee."

"Those proxy papers are forged," I countered, looking at Marcus, who was tracking our flight vector on a hardened tablet.

"Forgery is just an opinion until a judge says otherwise, darling," Victoria sneered. "And by sunrise, every news network in North America and Europe will be broadcasting your face. Wanted for corporate espionage, grand larceny, and the armed kidnapping of Dominic Vance. Your assets are being frozen as we speak. You have no money, no passport, and nowhere to land."

"You forgot one thing, Victoria," I whispered into the receiver.

"And what is that, my dear baggage handler?"

"My father didn't hide the real ledger in the boardroom. He hid it where you never bothered to look: beneath the tarmac."

I ended the call and tore the battery from the satellite phone, tossing it onto the floorboards.

"She’s locked down the European airspace," Marcus stated, watching the digitized radar maps glow red with intercept warnings. "Every civil radar station from Shannon to Frankfurt is flagged with your transponder profile."