MY MIL KICKED ME OUT FOR HER PREGNANT GRANDCHILD—THEN FOUND OUT I PAID THE $9,800 RENT AND OWNS EVERYTHING INSIDE / Chapter 47 / 77

Chapter 47 - The Whisper of the Chimera

Voss gestured with a flick of his wrist.

The mercenary holding Eleanor shoved her forward. She stumbled across the wet steel decking, falling to her knees. Marcus caught her instantly, pulling her behind us into our perimeter while Liam’s voice crackled softly in our earpieces: *Divers in position below deck. Charges set.*

"The drive," Voss demanded, extending an open, gloved hand.

I tossed the drive through the air. Voss caught it effortlessly with a grin of triumphant arrogance.

He stepped over to a rugged field laptop resting on a metal crate, plugged the drive into the USB port, and pressed execute.

The screen immediately flared with cascading lines of green code.

Voss’s grin widened—then froze.

The green text abruptly turned blood-red. A massive foundation seal flashed across the screen, accompanied by an automated, digitized progress counter: *GLOBAL BROADCAST COMMENCED. 14,800 SATELLITE PACKETS SENT TO REGULATORY AUTHORITIES.*

"What is this?!" Voss roared, whirling around with wild, furious eyes. "What did you do?!"

"I told the world the truth," I said calmly.

"Kill them!" Voss shrieked to his mercenaries. "Kill them all!"

Before the guards could raise their rifles, a series of muffled, concussive underwater explosions rocked the hull of the *Proteus*. The entire ship shuddered violently, listing five degrees to the port side as warning sirens shrieked into the night.

Liam and his breach team burst through the lower access hatches with blinding flashbang grenades. The deck erupted into smoke, gunfire, and chaotic screams as Marcus tackled me and Eleanor to the steel floor, covering us with his own body.

Within ninety seconds, Marcus’s operators had neutralized Voss’s mercenaries. Voss himself was pinned face-down against the wet steel deck, his cashmere coat soaked in oily harbor water as flex-cuffs bit into his wrists.

"It’s over, Voss," Marcus breathed, standing up and pulling me to my feet. "Your empire is finished."

Voss, his face pressed against the cold metal, began to laugh—a low, gurgling, hysterical laugh that sent a sudden spike of dread through my chest.

"You think this was about patents, Dr. Lin?" Voss choked out through a mouthful of bloody saltwater. "You think Helios acted alone?"

The ship’s central bridge intercom crackled to life, overriding the emergency evacuation sirens. A heavy, mechanical click hummed through the speakers scattered across the deck.

Then, a voice came over the loudspeaker—a calm, cultured, chillingly familiar voice that made the blood in my veins turn to absolute ice.

It wasn't Jonathan Cross.

It wasn't an executive from Helios.

*"Remarkable execution, Sarah,"* the voice purred smoothly over the ship's speakers. *"You always were the most brilliant investment I ever made."*

My heart stopped beating.

I knew that voice. I had known that voice since I was six years old—the voice of the man who had supposedly died in a car crash fifteen years ago, the biological father who had vanished without a trace, leaving me and my mother to the wolves.

*"Look at the radar screen on the bridge, my dear,"* my father’s voice whispered through the mist. *"You secured the research data, but you forgot to ask who built the foundation you stand on. You have four minutes before the scuttling charges in the keel detonate. Let's see if your brilliant science can keep you afloat."*