Chapter 26 - The Poisoned Sovereign
I froze, the barrel of the silenced pistol digging into my skin right below the occipital bone.
Slowly, carefully, I let the phone slide from my fingers. It hit the wet mud face-up, the screen still showing Arthur Vance’s triumphant sneer.
From the shadows behind the rusted pillar stepped Julianna.
She wasn’t dead.
She wore a charcoal-gray tactical turtleneck, her hair pulled back into a severe bun, completely devoid of the sultry, seductive glamour she had wielded in Dante’s executive office hours earlier. But on her shoulder, half-hidden beneath her jacket, was a blood-soaked bandage—the wound Dante had inflicted during the shootout in the tower.
“You,” I breathed, rage turning my vision red. “You played dead. Dante shot you…”
“He shot what he was supposed to shoot,” Julianna whispered, her gray eyes dead and emotionless. “A grazing round to the clavicle, accompanied by a theater blood squib. Dante’s a brilliant financier, Lena, but he’s never been a killer. He hesitates. And in our world, hesitation gets everyone around you butchered.”
“You seduced him,” I said, my teeth bared. “You broke my marriage for this?”
Julianna let out a dry, humorless chuckle. “I didn’t seduce him, you fool. Dante never touched me. On your fifth anniversary, when you walked into that office, I pulled him toward me because the sniper on the neighboring tower had a laser on his throat! If I hadn’t pulled him into that embrace, his skull would have splattered across his mahogany desk right in front of you!”
I blinked, the ground beneath my feet shifting as the pieces of the puzzle rearranged themselves into a new, terrifying picture. “He was protecting me…”
“He was trying to get you out of the city,” Julianna spat, her gun never wavering from my forehead. “He made you hate him so you would pack your bags, take Mateo, and run as far away from Chicago as possible. But you had to go to the doctor. You had to look at the genetic charts. You had to play the stubborn, loyal wife.”
“And what about Clara?” I demanded.
Julianna looked down at the pod. For a fraction of a second, something like guilt flickered across her sharp features. “Clara is the trigger for the collapse of Vance Global. The Syndicate is liquidating everything. Dante’s father traded Clara to the Castiglione cartel in exchange for immunity from the international war crimes tribunal.”
“And what do they do with her once they unlock the vault?” I asked, my voice dropping to a deadly, quiet whisper.
Julianna didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. The cold silence in the tunnel gave me the answer.
May you like
Once the vault was open, the key was obsolete.
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