Chapter 97 - Blood in the Cockpit
Arthur let out a guttural, broken scream—the sound of an old, ruined man finally realizing that the woman he worshipped for half a century was the demon that had destroyed his soul. He scrambled across the floor, lunging toward Margaret with his bare hands. "You killed him! You killed my boy!"
Margaret didn't hesitate. Her hand flashed to the Walther PPK on the table.
*BANG.*
Arthur’s momentum stopped dead. He gasped, a single bullet wound centered in his chest. He looked at Margaret with vacant, disbelieving eyes, then collapsed across the mahogany desk, knocking over the champagne bottle, his blood pooling into the plush Persian carpet.
"Messy," Margaret sighed, lowering the gun. "Arthur was always too emotional. That was his fatal flaw. But you, Claire... you have my stomach. You have my iron."
"I have nothing of yours," Claire hissed.
"Don't flatter yourself!" Margaret’s voice suddenly cracked with genuine, venomous rage, shedding her polite high-society veneer for the first time in her life. "Who do you think authorized your transfer to the Black Unit? Who do you think made sure the Navy covered up your early disciplinary files? I watched your career from every backroom in Washington! You thought you were serving your country, but every target you eliminated cleared a competitor from my board! You were my private executioner, Claire! The One-Eighty-Seven was Margaret Montgomery’s personal scalpel!"
The revelation struck Claire with the force of a physical blow, but her weapon did not waver by a single millimeter. Her mind flashed through every deployment, every shadow operation in Syria, Ukraine, and the Horn of Africa. The assassinations. The declassified files. The invisible hands that had directed her deployments.
Margaret had not merely discarded her—she had curated her suffering. She had forged the scalpel so that she could wield it in the shadows.
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"The difference between a scalpel and a soldier, Margaret," Claire said quietly, "is that a soldier chooses what she bleeds for."
Margaret smiled coldly. Her finger hovered over the terminal's enter key. "The submarine broadcast is fifty seconds away. You shoot me, and the dead-man sensor on my wrist will transmit the command instantly. Five Russian Typhoons will launch their payloads at London, Paris, and New York. You can't stop it, daughter. You either kneel, take your place at this console, and fly this world into the new dawn beside me... or you watch it burn."
