You’ll only embarrass me wearing that dress.

The descent was eighty feet of spiral iron, slick with condensation and smelling of industrial ozone and old blood.

Every ten steps, Phoebe’s tactical night-vision goggles painted the concrete walls in ghostly greens and grays. There were scorch marks along the conduit lines—remnants of old security measures that had been violently bypassed years ago. Ethan moved ahead of her with the fluid, silent grace of an apex predator on the hunt, his weapon extended, sweeping every landing before his boots touched the rusted treads.

At the base of the shaft lay a blast door five feet thick, made of forged tungsten-steel. It was cracked open three inches, held in place by a hydraulic bypass wedge.

Phoebe pressed her back against the wet concrete beside the threshold, listening.

Beyond the door, the opera music swelled. The aria was *Vissi d'arte*—a song of love, art, and tragic death. Beneath the soaring soprano notes came the steady, rhythmic *drip-drip-drip* of water hitting metal, and the shallow, agonizing rattle of human lungs struggling for survival.

Ethan signaled with two fingers: *Enter, split, cover.*

They crossed the threshold simultaneously.

The chamber beyond was vast, a cavernous subterranean bunker carved out of the living granite of the Rhode Island coastline. In the center of the room, illuminated by three surgical overhead lamps, was a raised steel platform.

Tied to a heavy industrial chair in the center of the light was Raymond Harrell.

His face was almost unrecognizable. Bruises of deep purple and mottled yellow covered his hollow cheeks. His split lips were caked with dried crimson, his tailored tuxedo shredded and soaked in sweat and grime. An intravenous line ran from a steel IV pole into his left arm, feeding a clear, pale fluid directly into his circulatory system. Beside him, an electronic heart monitor beeped with a frantic, irregular tempo—his heart rate fluctuating dangerously between 140 and 45 beats per minute.

"Dad..." Phoebe’s breath caught in her throat, her weapon instantly steadying as her tactical gaze swept the shadows surrounding the platform.

"Phoebe... no..." Raymond’s voice was a cracked, broken whisper behind his swollen tongue. His eyes, barely visible through the swelling, darted frantically toward the darkness above. "Get... out... it’s... not..."

"Raymond, be quiet," a voice drifted from the catwalks twenty feet above them. "You'll elevate your blood pressure, and then the potassium chloride will finish the job before we can conclude our business."

From behind a row of towering mainframe server racks, a figure stepped into the harsh white glare of the surgical lights.

Victoria Vance looked as though time had been forbidden from touching her. She was nearly sixty, yet her face possessed the severe, sculpted beauty of marble. Her silver-streaked hair was swept back into an aristocratic chignon, held in place by an antique jade hairpin. She wore a tailored black coat of Italian vicuña wool, gloves of butter-soft black calfskin, and carried a slender, silver-handled cane. In her left hand, she casually held a remote detonator.

"Look at you both," Victoria said, descending the catwalk stairs with the slow, rhythmic cadence of a queen holding court. "The runaway Harrell orphan and my disappointing son. What a remarkably tragic picture you make."

Ethan’s weapon remained trained dead on the center of her forehead. His finger took up the slack on the trigger. "Step away from the console, Victoria."

"Or what, Ethan?" Victoria smiled, stopping at the edge of the lower platform, fifteen feet away. Her eyes were completely devoid of maternal warmth; they were the cold, calculating eyes of a reptile assessing prey. "You'll shoot your own mother? You don't have the stomach for it. If you did, you would have executed Eleanor Harrell in Como instead of handing her over to the Italian authorities like a dutiful little civil servant."

"Eleanor was a criminal," Phoebe spat, stepping forward, her gun never wavering from Victoria’s chest. "You are an infection."

Victoria turned her ice-blue gaze toward Phoebe, up and down, looking at the tactical gear, the bruises on her jaw, the fire in her stance. A sneer of absolute aristocratic contempt curled the older woman's lips.

"You really think you're something extraordinary, don't you, little girl?" Victoria whispered. "Wearing combat gear, playing soldier beside my son. But I remember what you were. When you first married into the Harrell household, you were nothing but a broken little thing crying in the hallway because Eleanor told you your mother’s dresses made you look like a kitchen maid. You were weak. You were pathetic."

"And that pathetic girl just locked your sixty billion dollars into a digital void you can never touch," Phoebe countered without flinching. "You are broke, Victoria. The Swiss accounts are frozen. The Syndicate’s dummy corporations have been flagged by five separate intelligence agencies. You don't have an empire anymore. You just have an old bunker and an old man you're torturing out of spite."

Victoria’s jaw clenched, a micro-fracture appearing in her composed veneer.

"Money is merely paper and electronic pulses, child," Victoria said softly. "Power is the ability to decide who breathes and who rots. That IV line in Raymond’s arm is delivering a delayed-action neurolytic agent. In three minutes, his cardiac muscle will seize permanently. The only antidote is in my coat pocket."

Victoria tapped her chest where a silver cylindrical case rested.

"Now," Victoria said, stepping toward the primary server terminal. "You will cancel the cryptographic freeze on the *Vesper-Nine* ledger. You will enter the override keys into this console. Or you will watch Raymond choke on his own tongue while you stand there helpless."

Ethan took a step forward, his voice a low, terrifying rumble that shook the damp concrete. "You touch that console, and I will take your hand off."

Victoria laughed—a chilling, hollow sound. "You always were too sentimental, Ethan. Just like your father. Let me remind you what happens to sentimental men in this family."