Chapter 28 - The Matriarch's Resurrection
“One more step, and little Grace learns what the rocks at the bottom of Lake Champlain taste like,” Genevieve whispered. Her voice was breathy, ragged, but her hand was steady as stone.
Emily froze in her tracks, twenty feet away, her hands raised in desperate surrender. “Please… please, Genevieve. Don't do this. Take the money. Take the Swiss accounts. Take Vance Global. Just give me my baby.”
Genevieve laughed, a bitter, broken sound that carried over the howling wind. “The money? Do you think this was ever about the money, Emily? I grew up locked in a gilded cage in Paris, listening to stories of the magnificent Ryan Vance. Ryan, the golden boy. Ryan, who had the mother Charles took from me. Ryan, who had the name, the public adulation, the clean conscience!”
Ryan stepped forward slowly, his hands held high, his weapons long discarded on the concrete behind him.
“You’re right, Genevieve,” Ryan said, his voice completely calm, soothing, projecting absolute stillness into the gale. “You were cheated. Charles and Margaret used you. Just like they used Julian. Just like they tried to use me.”
Genevieve’s eyes flashed with manic fury. “Do not patronize me, brother! You don't know what it’s like to be erased!”
“I know what it’s like to have Margaret Vance as a mother,” Ryan replied softly, taking a single, imperceptible half-step forward. “She doesn't love anyone, Genevieve. She didn't love my father. She didn't love Julian. She doesn't love you. Look back at the dining hall. She would have watched you die tonight if it meant she could board that jet alone.”
Genevieve’s grip on the bassinet tightened. For the briefest fraction of a second, an expression of profound, agonizing vulnerability flickered across her aristocratic face—the wounded, abandoned twelve-year-old girl who had poisoned horses just to see what love looked like.
In that microscopic window of distraction, Emily moved.
She didn't plead. She didn't hesitate. Emily launched herself across the wet steel grating like a predator, her body diving low beneath Genevieve’s peripheral vision.
Emily’s hands locked onto the wicker frame of the bassinet, wrenching it backward toward the safe platform with all the desperate strength in her maternal soul.
“No!” Genevieve shrieked, pulling a hidden stiletto knife from her sleeve and slashing down toward Emily’s exposed neck.
Ryan lunged forward, throwing his forearm into the blade’s path. The razor-sharp steel sliced deep through Ryan’s coat and flesh, carving a five-inch gash along his forearm, but Ryan didn't even grunt.
With his uninjured right arm, Ryan seized Genevieve by the throat, driving her backward away from Emily and slamming her against the crumpled fuselage of the crippled helicopter.
Emily rolled across the grating, cradling the bassinet against her stomach, shielding Grace with her entire body. Grace was wailing at the top of her lungs, terrified by the cold and the noise, but she was alive. She was uninjured.
“I’ve got her!” Emily wept, kissing Grace’s forehead through her tears. “Ryan, I have her!”
Genevieve struggled under Ryan’s iron grip, her manicured fingers clawing at his hand, her face turning purple. But as Ryan looked into his half-sister’s eyes, he saw no surrender. Only the bottomless, venomous void of Charles Vance’s twisted bloodline.
“Go on,” Genevieve choked out, spitting blood against Ryan’s collar. “Kill me, little brother. Prove to the world that you are Charles’s son after all. Become the murderer Margaret always said you were.”
Ryan’s muscles tightened. Every instinct in his ancestral DNA screamed at him to snap her neck and end the Vance family curse right here on the edge of the cliff.
He raised his right fist.
“Ryan, stop!”
The voice came from behind them. Not Emily’s.
Standing at the entrance of the cavern tunnel, leaning heavily against the rock wall with an antique revolver clutched in her trembling hands, was Margaret Vance.
Her emerald gown was covered in soot, her hair tangled, her face a mask of ruined pride and psychotic desperation.
“Margaret…” Ryan breathed, keeping one hand pinned to Genevieve’s chest.
Margaret raised the revolver, her hands shaking so violently that the heavy iron cylinder rattled. Her bloodshot eyes darted between Ryan and Genevieve.
“You ungrateful, treacherous little bitch,” Margaret snarled, glaring directly at Genevieve. “I made you. I gave Charles a real daughter. And you tried to leave me for the FBI.”
Genevieve let out a choked laugh from against the helicopter. “Pull the trigger, Mother. You’ve been wanting to kill me since the day you hid me in Paris.”
Margaret cocked the hammer of the revolver with a heavy, lethal *click*.
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“Nobody discards Margaret Vance,” the matriarch whispered.
***
