Chapter 37 - The Room of Sins
Rachel hauled Alexander Sterling to his feet by his hair, shoving the cold muzzle of her sidearm hard under his jawline. The proud Architect of the Covenant was now a bleeding, limping wreck, his tailored white coat soaked in grime and his aristocratic arrogance reduced to shallow, terrified gasps.
"Move," she ordered.
Arthur caught up, scooping Lily into his left arm while holding the recovered assault rifle in his right. His face was pale, his breathing heavy and rattling with internal bleeding, but his eyes were locked forward. "The service tunnel to the right, Rachel. It cuts through the bedrock straight into Blackwood Dam's hydroelectric turbine room. Daniel kept an escape dock there."
They pushed Sterling through the heavy steel door, navigating a narrow maintenance catwalk suspended fifty feet over a roaring underground river. The thunderous roar of millions of gallons of water rushing through the massive hydroelectric turbines shook the concrete beneath their boots.
At the end of the catwalk, suspended over a moonlit subterranean basin where the river met the open bay, sat the Covenant's ultimate extraction asset: *The Leviathan*, an ultra-sleek, black-hulled stealth midget submarine.
And standing on the gangway of that submarine, surrounded by half a dozen Covenant technicians frantically typing into portable server banks, was a face Rachel had believed buried in the family cemetery five years ago.
"Victoria?" Rachel gasped, the weapon in her hand wavering for a fraction of a second.
Standing under the halogen floodlights was Victoria Vance—Arthur’s second wife, Daniel Montgomery’s stepmother, and the woman who had personally tightened the iron dog collar around Lily’s neck.
She was dressed not in prison rags, but in an immaculate tactical flight suit, a heavy diamond necklace resting over her Kevlar vest.
"Hello, Rachel," Victoria said with a cruel, mocking smile, holding up a small glass of champagne. "Did you really think Daniel was acting alone? Daniel was an idiot with mommy issues. But he followed instructions well enough."
Lily shrank back against Arthur’s chest, her tiny fingers digging into the fabric of his coat. "The closet lady..." Lily whispered, pure horror washing over her. "She’s the one who held my head under the bathwater..."
"You," Arthur snarled, his voice breaking into a thunderous bellow that echoed across the turbine chamber. "I gave you my name! I gave you my fortune! I pulled you from the gutter!"
"And you made me a second-class citizen in your own house!" Victoria shrieked back, her composed mask shattering into a hideous snarl of pure entitlement. "Everything was for David! Everything was for the little pristine granddaughter! What about my son? What about Daniel? You treated him like an unwanted bastard! So I made sure your precious granddaughter learned what it felt like to be treated like an animal!"
Victoria pointed at Lily, her red-painted lips curling with disgust. "Look at her! The great Vance heiress! She spent six months eating out of a dog bowl, sleeping on wet newspapers, begging me for water! And now, her miserable little life is going to pay for our new world order!"
"Five minutes remaining," a technician announced mechanically from the console. "Targeting uplink locked on Washington, Moscow, Beijing, London. Retinal confirmation bypass initiated."
"Victoria," Alexander Sterling gasped, struggling against Rachel’s grip. "Activate... the defense grid... shoot them!"
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Victoria looked at Sterling, then at Rachel, and then slowly smiled.
She reached into her vest, pulled out a gold-plated revolver, and fired two bullets directly into Alexander Sterling’s chest.
