Chapter 29 - Burning the Pedestal
"The Killswitch," I repeated, my pulse remaining steady, though a cold coil tightened in the pit of my stomach.
"In 1989," Alexander whispered, his voice smooth as silk, "before you were even born, I embedded a subterranean contingency protocol into the central clearing houses of the global shipping index. A digital dead man's handle. If I am arrested on federal soil for more than twelve hours, the offshore sovereign debentures held by Vance Global don't just freeze—they auto-execute a scorched-earth liquidation. Forty billion dollars in synthetic short positions will flood the New York, London, and Tokyo exchanges simultaneously."
He tapped his watch against the glass table.
"It's already running, Victoria. The clock started the second your federal friends clamped their hands on my wrists. In four hours, Vance Global will not exist. The stock will crash to zero. The banks will seize every asset you spent eight years bleeding for. You will be the queen of an ash heap, and you will share a cell right next to me for gross corporate negligence and international market manipulation."
He sat back down, picking up his mineral water, absolute in his supreme confidence.
"Sign the sovereign release," he commanded, sliding an encrypted titanium drive across the table toward me. "Drop the federal charges, release the root-level maritime keys, and step aside. I will grant you a hundred million dollars in severance and let you live in quiet exile in New Zealand. If you don't... you burn with me."
I looked at the titanium drive. Then I looked at the man who had created me, manipulated my husband into cuckoldry, and spent his life playing god with human lives.
I picked up the drive.
Alexander smiled. The predictable, arrogant smile of a man who believed the world must always bend to his will.
I took three steps backward, toward the reinforced steel trash receptacle near the door.
I dropped the drive into the chute, pulled a small canister of military-grade thermite paste from my blazer pocket, smeared it across the opening, and pulled the ignition pin.
A blinding, hissing white flash of four-thousand-degree heat illuminated the room. The titanium drive dissolved into a bubbling puddle of molten metal within three seconds, melting right through the steel bottom.
Alexander shot out of his chair, his face contorting in sheer, unbridled horror. "What have you done?!" he screamed.
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"You wanted to see if I had the stomach to face the man who built the empire," I said, watching the white sparks reflect in the dead calm of my eyes. "I don't want your throne, Alexander. And I don't care about your ash heap. I’m not playing your game anymore."
***
