She Joked That Everyone Forgot Her Birthday / Chapter 56 / 60

Chapter 56 - The Iron Falcon Departs

For thirty-six agonizing hours, the *Sovereign Shadow* battered its way through the freezing hell of the North Atlantic.

The air temperature plummeted past negative twenty degrees. Thick rime ice formed along the interceptor’s canopy, weeping frozen tears across the ballistic glass. The waves grew into towering, thirty-foot black walls of water that crashed over the bow, rattling the hull down to its skeletal rivets.

Inside the small, heated cabin, the reality of our lives had stripped away every lingering illusion.

I sat on the edge of the crew berth, stitching a deep laceration along Nicholas’s shoulder that had reopened during our escape through the reef. The needle passed through his skin with surgical precision; he didn't flinch once, his eyes fixed on the nautical charts glowing green on the navigation desk.

"You should have told me," I said quietly, knotting the suture thread with practiced ease. "About my grandfather. About the charter. You let me live my entire life thinking I was just a girl from the docks who got lucky."

Nicholas turned his head slowly, looking at me. In the harsh cockpit light, the lines around his eyes were etched deep with exhaustion and an unspeakable grief.

"You were never 'just a girl from the docks,' Elena," he said, reaching out to cover my blood-stained fingers with his own. "Your grandfather was the greatest man I ever knew. When my father was dying, he looked at me and said, 'The Sterlings have the money to build a kingdom, but the Vances have the soul to protect it.' I didn't marry you because of the vault. I went to that cafe to see if Jonathan Vance's granddaughter had his heart."

"And did she?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

"She proved it every day you chose to stand beside me instead of running," Nicholas said softly, lifting my hand to press a kiss against my knuckles. "And now I've dragged you into the mouth of the beast."

"You didn't drag me anywhere, Nicholas Sterling," I said, meeting his gaze with unyielding steel. "I chose you. And whoever that monster is wearing your brother's face, he made a mistake thinking I'm a hostage to be carried to an altar."

Before Nicholas could answer, the proximity alert chimed once, low and resonant.

Through the salt-encrusted forward windscreen, the darkness of the Arctic dawn began to fracture.

Emerging from the icy fog ahead were the jagged, snow-capped basalt cliffs of Greenland’s eastern coast. The entrance to Scoresby Sound loomed before us like the gates of an underworld carved from black ice and frozen granite.

And waiting at the mouth of the sound was not our allied wolfpack.

Floating in the dead, freezing water was the burning, blackened carcass of a massive Norwegian patrol frigate—Lindqvist’s flagship—cut cleanly in two, its smoldering superstructure hissing into the sub-zero sea.

Surrounding the wreckage were four massive, modern fast-attack corvettes flying the black flag of the Northern Tribunal.