Chapter 48 - The Council’s Guillotine
The heavy steel blast doors of the grand gallery suddenly blew inward with a thunderous roar.
Smoke, fire, and shards of metal rained across the marble floor. Ethan lunged forward, tackling Arthur Vance to the ground as a concussive shockwave ripped through the room, shattering the three-hundred-foot panoramic glass wall facing the North Sea.
Freezing arctic air and blinding sea spray violently surged into the room, tearing tapestries from the walls and scattering centuries of ledgers into the void.
From the gaping hole where the blast doors had stood, six operatives dressed in unmarked matte-black combat suits entered the room. They carried specialized suppressed carbines, moving with the terrifying, rhythmic precision of Tier-One operators.
"Ethan!" Victoria shrieked from the corner, where she had been thrown against a marble pillar, blood streaming from her temple.
The lead operator raised his rifle and fired two clean shots.
Victoria's screams abruptly stopped. She slumped against the pillar, two red blooms blooming across the center of her charcoal coat, her eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.
"Victoria!" Arthur Sterling wailed from his tipped-over wheelchair, crawling across the broken glass toward his sister's body.
Ethan dragged Vance behind an overturned granite table as bullets stitched across the stone, chipping marble like hail. Above them on the catwalks, Commander Briggs and his men opened fire, returning the fusillade with deafening roars of automatic rifles.
"Who are they?!" Vance screamed, hyperventilating as shards of hot copper ricocheted off the granite above his head. "Ethan, who are they?!"
"The real Council," Ethan hissed, his mind racing through every asset list, every offshore charter he had studied in Zurich.
Arthur had claimed Genevieve was a decoy. But Arthur was wrong about one thing: he wasn't the only architect.
A voice resonated through the gallery’s tactical PA system—smooth, cultured, and speaking through a digital scrambler that chilled Ethan to the marrow:
*"Arthur Sterling. Your usefulness to the Consortium expired the moment your grandson unified the accounts. You were an arrogant old relic who mistook our patience for your supremacy."*
Ethan peered around the edge of the granite slab.
Walking through the smoke was a man in an immaculate navy-blue trench coat, completely unbothered by the gunfire above. He carried an antique silver-inlaid cane—identical in design to Victoria’s, but bearing the insignia of the European Central Banking Commission.
Beside him walked a woman Ethan knew only too well.
Her blonde hair was cut short. Her face bore a thin, jagged scar from the glass shards of the Zurich boardroom, but her predatory smirk was unmistakable.
"Genevieve," Ethan breathed, the air turning to sulfuric poison in his lungs.
Genevieve Montague stepped over the bodies of Arthur’s guards with theatrical elegance.
"Did you miss me, Ethan?" she purred over the roaring gale from the broken window. "You really should have checked the medical ward in Lausanne before you got on that boat. My heart attack was as real as your grandfather's conscience."
Arthur Sterling, bleeding from glass cuts on his face, looked up from the floor at Genevieve, his jaw slack with disbelief. "Genevieve... I created you! I took you from the gutter in Vienna!"
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"And you treated me like an employee for fifty years, Arthur," Genevieve said coldly, not even looking down at him. She turned her eyes toward the overturned granite table where Ethan was concealed. "Come out, Ethan. Bring Eleanor's charter. The grown-ups have business to conclude."
***
