Chapter 49 - A Sister's Final Choice
Eleanor lay motionless on the shattered floor, her breath rattling faintly through her teeth as her life bled out onto the ice.
Clara stood frozen, staring down at the sister who had hunted her, poisoned her, and yet shared her very blood.
"Why?" Clara whispered, her voice cracking with deep, ancestral grief as she looked at Arthur. "She was your daughter."
"She was a failed investment," Arthur spat, his breathing growing increasingly shallow as shock claimed his aging body.
Outside, the blizzard suddenly quieted, the ferocious alpine winds giving way to an eerie, deadening mountain silence.
Through the broken windows, the first pale, gray light of dawn began to creep over the jagged peaks of the Swiss Alps.
"Marcus," I called out weakly, turning toward the doorway where my brother-in-law was slumping toward the ground.
Marcus was sliding down the doorframe, his shotgun clattering to the floor as his strength finally evaporated completely.
"I’m good... just need a minute," Marcus mumbled, his eyelids fluttering as blood pooled heavily beneath his crushed legs.
Clara knelt between the bodies of her sister and her husband, the burden of a hundred tragedies pressing onto her shoulders.
"We have to get them down the mountain," Clara said, panic creeping back into her voice as she looked at our wounds.
"There’s no going back down the shaft, Clara," I said, wincing as I tried to move my left arm. "The lower vault collapsed."
Arthur let out a low, mocking chuckle from the base of the panoramic window, his teeth coated in dark, arterial blood.
"No one is coming for you," Arthur wheezed, his eyes glazed with the approaching gray veil of death.
"The Swiss authorities think this facility is a deactivated weather station," Arthur gasped, clutching his shattered chest.
"And my private extraction team was ordered to liquidate anyone left standing on this summit at zero-six-hundred."
Clara glanced down at her tactical wristwatch; the glowing digital numbers read 05:58.
"Two minutes," Clara whispered, looking out into the misty, gray whiteout of the alpine morning.
From far below in the valley, the rhythmic, heavy thumping of twin turboshaft helicopter rotors began to reverberate off the peaks.
"They won't ask questions," Arthur whispered, a dying, sadistic smile stretching across his blue lips. "They are cleaners."
The sound of the approaching aircraft grew louder, rattling the cracked observation glass with thunderous, low-frequency vibrations.
Clara looked at our daughter, then down at me, her jaw setting into that familiar, unyielding line of absolute defiance.
"Pick up the gun," Clara said to me, her voice cold and steady as steel.
May you like
"Clara, there are too many of them," I said, trying to push myself upright against the weight of my bleeding shoulder.
"Then we make them pay for every inch," she said.
