Chapter 50 - The Glass Throne Shatters
"Drop your weapons, all of you!" Victoria shrieked, pressing the steel needle of the surgical drill deeper against Mateo’s throat, drawing a thin bead of crimson blood. "Drop them, or I scramble the boy's nervous system before you can blink!"
Marcus immediately lowered his assault rifle to the floor, his eyes locked onto Victoria with lethal intent. "Let the boy go, Victoria. You're out of moves."
"I am never out of moves, Miller," Castiglione’s rasping voice echoed through his ventilator speaker. The old monster slowly stood up, leaning on an ivory cane. "You brought me the antidote, Dante? Or did you come here merely to watch your line extinguished forever?"
Dante stepped forward, tossing the empty autoinjector onto the polished marble floor. His heart was hammering audibly in his chest, his thirty minutes rapidly running out. "Let Mateo walk to his mother, Castiglione. I have the master encryption keys to the Geneva accounts in my head. Let them leave, and I will upload everything to your sovereign server."
Castiglione chuckled, a dry, rattling sound like dead leaves. "You fool. I don't need your accounts anymore. Clara's marrow will grant me twenty years. And your boy's death will be the lesson the world remembers."
He raised his hand to signal Victoria to activate the drill.
"MOM!" Mateo's muffled scream cut through the tape.
In that fraction of a second, I didn't think. I didn't breathe.
I drew the ceramic backup pistol hidden in my sleeve and fired—not at Victoria, not at Castiglione, but at the four-inch-thick tempered glass directly behind them.
The high-velocity round hit the single structural stress point Marcus had marked on the architectural blueprints.
A sound like an artillery shell detonated through the room.
The entire four-hundred-square-foot pane of reinforced glass shattered into ten million crystal fragments. The negative barometric pressure of the blizzard outside violently depressurized the penthouse, creating a hurricane-force vortex that sucked the heavy furniture, surgical trays, and medical equipment out into the open sky!
Victoria lost her footing, screaming as the howling wind tore her away from Mateo, dragging her backward over the precipice into the eight-hundred-foot drop into the freezing abyss of Lake Michigan!
Marcus lunged across the floor, catching Mateo by his sweater just as the boy was pulled toward the ledge, dragging him back into the shelter of an overturned marble pillar.
At the same moment, Dante charged Castiglione. The two men crashed against the edge of the shattered floor, suspended over the terrifying drop, Dante's hands locked around the old tyrant's throat.
"Dante, no!" I screamed, fighting against the blinding, ninety-mile-per-hour winds, reaching toward him with everything I had.
Castiglione, laughing maniacally through his bleeding teeth, clicked the remote detonator in his palm.
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*"If I burn, Dante... we all burn together!"*
Below our feet, the structural support pillars of the eightieth floor began to detonate in a synchronized sequence of blinding explosions, the entire ceiling of the skyscraper groaning as thousands of tons of steel and concrete began to collapse directly toward our heads...
