Chapter 66 - The Viper Behind Bars
The subterranean interrogation suite beneath 26 Federal Plaza was cold, damp, and smelled of industrial floor stripper.
Victoria Sterling sat alone at a stainless-steel table, her wrists bolted to an iron ring anchored into the concrete floor. Her diamond-encrusted rings and pearl necklace had been confiscated, replaced by an ill-fitting orange jumpsuit. Her silver-streaked hair, usually coiffed to perfection, hung in stringy strands around her gaunt face.
Yet, despite her captivity, she held her chin high. She was a queen in chains, convinced her kingdom was merely undergoing a minor rebellion.
The heavy steel door buzzed and swung open.
Victoria didn't look up immediately. "I told your pathetic little agents already," she sneered. "I have sovereign diplomatic immunity through our Luxembourg holdings. You cannot hold me for more than six hours without triggering an international incident."
"Your Luxembourg immunity was revoked twenty minutes ago by royal decree," Ethan’s voice cut through the damp chill.
Victoria’s head snapped up.
Ethan stood in the doorway, dressed in a fresh dark suit, though his eyes carried the exhaustion and lethal edge of a man who had not slept in days. He pulled out the steel chair across from her and sat down, resting his elbows on the cold metal surface.
Victoria stared at him, her lips twisting into a grotesque sneer. "Still playing the dutiful son, Ethan? Why aren't you at the morgue? Have they begun scraping your little whore off the runway yet?"
Ethan didn't flinch. His expression didn't change. He simply reached into his pocket and placed an audio recorder on the table, pressing play.
*Click.*
Pendelton’s cultured, mocking voice filled the small room:
*"Victoria was a blunt instrument—brilliant at accumulation, catastrophic at control. She became unhinged. She would have burned forty billion dollars just to hurt you. We needed Victoria to commit an unpardonable federal atrocity... She will spend the rest of her days in a private sanatorium in Switzerland, medicated into silence."*
The color drained from Victoria’s face. The aristocratic arrogance that had sustained her for decades shattered into a look of raw, humiliating shock.
"Arthur...?" she whispered, her hands trembling within their iron shackles. "No. No, Arthur was Charles's most loyal man. He answers to *me*."
"Arthur used you, Mother," Ethan said, his voice flat and cruel. "You were the rabid dog he let off the leash to cause a scene. You put a bomb on an empty plane. Eleanor and Olivia were never on it."
Victoria’s breath caught in her throat. "They... they’re alive?"
"They were extracted by Pendelton’s men before your remote ever clicked," Ethan said, leaning closer. "Pendelton knows Olivia is pregnant. He took them to the old Vanderbilt Medical Annex. He’s going to extract the child to trigger the sovereign conservatorship, lock you in an asylum for the rest of your miserable life, and use my child as a puppet to control the Sterling fortune."
Victoria’s eyes darted frantically around the concrete room, her mind processing the magnitude of the betrayal. Her pride, her hatred, her entire crusade against Olivia—it had all been weaponized against her by the very men she thought she commanded.
"They wouldn't dare..." she hissed, her voice cracking. "I am the matriarch! I built this family!"
"You destroyed this family," Ethan corrected coldly. "And right now, you are sitting in a federal cage facing domestic terrorism charges while Arthur Pendelton and Marcus Kane carve up your empire like vultures over a fresh carcass. When this night is over, they will have the child. They will have the billions. And you will be remembered as the madwoman who blew up an empty jet and died in an upstate madhouse."
Tears of pure, unadulterated humiliation welled in Victoria’s eyes. She slammed her shackled fists onto the table, the iron chain rattling violently.
"They cannot have it!" she screamed, her voice echoing off the concrete walls. "It belongs to *me*! The Sterling name belongs to *me*!"
"Then give me the override codes," Ethan said, his voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper. "Pendelton’s facility is fortified with your late husband's automated defense protocols. The blast doors are sealed from the inside. If I breach with conventional explosives, the secondary fail-safe will flood the subterranean medical wing with halon gas. Olivia and Eleanor will suffocate before we reach them."
Victoria stared at him, her chest heaving with ragged breaths. Her hatred for Ethan was a deep, black well, but her hatred for being discarded, for being played like a fool by her husband's old lackeys, was an inferno.
"If I give you the bypass," Victoria rasped, her eyes narrowing with feral desperation, "what do I get?"
"You get to watch Arthur Pendelton and Marcus Kane burn," Ethan said coldly. "And you get to spend the rest of your life knowing that the only reason the Sterling name survives is because the child of the 'nobody' you despised will inherit every single penny you ever touched."
Victoria glared at him for five long seconds. Then, a ghastly, bitter laugh broke from her cracked lips.
"Sub-level three," she whispered. "The biometric scanner isn't calibrated to Charles’s voice. It’s calibrated to his heartbeat sequence. The bypass code is his date of death followed by the sovereign registry number: 0-9-1-8-Seven-Zero-Zero-Nine. But you’re too late, Ethan."
"Why?" Ethan demanded, standing up.
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"Because Arthur didn't just hire mercenaries," Victoria whispered with a chilling grin. "He hired the Praetorian Guard. And Miller... Miller never leaves a witness alive."
***
