“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 77 / 80

Chapter 77 - The Sovereign Inheritance

Back in the St. Gotthard vault, the air had turned venomous.

The countdown monitor on Maximilian’s desk suddenly flickered. The digital readouts went haywire, lines of corrupted hexadecimal code cascading down the screen like green rain:

*TELEMETRY OVERFLOW ERROR.*

*SIGNAL SEVERED: SECTOR 4.*

*HEARTBEAT TERMINATED.*

Maximilian’s head jerked up, his skeletal hands trembling violently against the armrests of his leather chair. A ghastly, triumphant smile split his wrinkled face.

“He is dead,” Maximilian breathed, exhaling a rattling breath of pure malice. “The fool attempted to cross the perimeter. The acoustic charge has torn his throat out. Dante Vance is nothing more than frozen carrion in the Italian rocks.”

My heart stopped.

A cold, bottomless void opened beneath my feet. The room spun. The faces of the armed guards blurred into smeared gray silhouettes. For a single, terrifying second, my soul screamed into an abyss—*No. Not Dante. Not after everything.*

Then Leo gripped my hand. Tight.

His small fingers dug into my palm with an uncanny, iron-willed strength. He looked up at me, his wide, dark brown eyes—eyes that were the exact carbon copy of his father’s—shining with an impossible clarity.

“Mommy,” Leo whispered, his voice clear and untainted by tears. “Daddy didn't fall. I can hear him.”

The titanium flash drive in my hand burned against my skin like a brand.

*He didn't die,* my mind screamed, the grief transforming instantly into a cold, lethal rage that washed through my veins like pure liquid oxygen. *Dante cut the leash.*

Maximilian stood up, towering over the table with the grotesque vitality of a vampire sensing the kill. “It is finished, Laura. The lineage has passed to the child alone. Place his hand on the terminal, or my men will hold him down and harvest the biometric pattern from his severed fingers.”

“You touch my son,” I said, my voice dropping to a register so low and deadly that even the guards shifted uncomfortably, “and you will die before your bloodline key ever touches the satellite.”

“Empty threats from a broken widow,” Maximilian sneered, reaching into his jacket and drawing a silver, pearl-handled pistol, pointing the barrel directly between my eyes. “Hand over the boy.”

“Take him then,” I whispered.

I didn't reach for Leo’s hand. I moved with the explosive speed Dante had drilled into me during those brutal, paranoid months in the safehouses of Lake Shore Drive.

I didn't shove Leo toward the terminal. I drove the heavy, steel-tipped titanium flash drive straight into the open primary diagnostic port of Maximilian’s medical telemetry console on the desk!

“What are you doing?!” Maximilian shrieked, lunging forward.

*EMP PAYLOAD: DEPLOYED.*

A high-pitched electrical whine tore through the room. A split-second later, a blinding blue arc of electrostatic energy erupted from the console, shattering the glass screens into a shower of sparkling diamonds.

The lights in the St. Gotthard Depository didn't just flicker.