“HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, YOU LIARS!”—I Caught My Millionaire Husband Kissing His Mistress in His Private Office on Our FIFTH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY, Then Walked Out Without Looking Back! But Hours Later, a Doctor Turned a Monitor Toward Me—and What I Discovered Would Change Both Our Lives Forever... / Chapter 42 / 80

Chapter 42 - Blood on the Black Ice

The sub-deck corridor was an icy vortex of wind and freezing spray. Every breath burned our lungs like powdered glass. Dante stumbled, his knees buckling under the catastrophic cellular strain that had been eating away at his nervous system since Geneva.

"Dante!" I caught him by the tactical harness, my muscles screaming under the combined weight of my dying husband and my terrified children. Clara was crying now, the piercing wail of an infant echoing off the frozen iron, while Mateo clenched my sleeve with white knuckles.

"Leave me, Bri... please," Dante gasped, his skin turning an alarming, translucent gray. The black veins along his neck were pulsing erratically, the lethal byproduct of the neural feedback Castiglione had engineered. "Take Marcus's hand. He can get you across the Canadian perimeter. I'm... I'm spent."

"Shut your mouth, Dante Ferraro!" I snarled, tears freezing instantly against my flushed cheeks as I forced his arm back over my shoulder. "You don't get to die on me now. You don't get to leave me to raise our children alone in the dark! Walk!"

A heavy hand clamped down on Dante's other shoulder, lifting half his dead weight in an instant. Marcus Miller stood beside us, his assault rifle slung across his broad chest, his weathered face set in stone.

"He walks, Brianna," my father said, his low baritone cutting through the howling blizzard. "A man who bleeds for my daughter earns his place at the table. Move!"

We spilled out of the breach onto the vast, windswept ice sheet of northern Lake Michigan. Fifty yards away, a massive, black hovercraft with darkened, reinforced glass idle-hummed against the shelf, its dual turbofans throwing blinding sheets of snow into the midnight sky.

Suddenly, high-caliber sniper rounds punched into the ice around our boots, sending geysers of pulverized frost five feet into the air.

"Sniper at two o'clock! Ridge of the icebreaker's conning tower!" Marcus barked into his throat-mic. "Suppress and deploy thermal smoke!"

Twin smoke canisters hissed open from the hovercraft's hull, enveloping us in a thick, sulfurous white cloud that blinded thermal scopes. Dante groaned, coughing up dark blood onto my coat, but he forced his legs to churn through the knee-deep drifts.

We reached the hovercraft’s ramp. Two of Marcus’s operators hauled Dante aboard, securing him onto an emergency trauma gurney. I scrambled inside with Mateo and Clara, collapsing against the padded metal bulkhead as the heavy hydraulic ramp sealed shut with an airtight hiss.

The hovercraft lurched forward, roaring across the frozen lake at eighty knots. Inside the pressurized cabin, the sudden silence was deafening, broken only by Clara’s soft whimpers and the rapid, synthetic beep of a medical monitor wired to Dante’s chest.

I sat on the deck, my hands shaking uncontrollably, staring across the narrow aisle at the ghost who shared my blood.

Marcus unclasped his tactical helmet, letting it drop to the floor. The wrinkles around his eyes deepened as he looked down at me, his expression a devastating mixture of profound sorrow, ferocious pride, and decades of regret.