Chapter 40 - The Third Veil of Blood
The subterranean vault plunged into absolute, suffocating silence.
Arthur turned his head slowly, looking at Clara.
Her eyes were fixed on the floor, her breathing shallow, her face paler than the stone statues surrounding them.
"Clara..." Arthur whispered, his heart breaking into a thousand jagged pieces. "Did you know?"
"Arthur, don't look at her," Vance mocked from across the room. "Look at me. Look at the detonator in my hand."
Clara finally raised her head.
Tears spilled over her eyelashes, cutting clean tracks through the gunpowder residue on her skin.
"I didn't bring you here to save Beatrice, Arthur," she confessed, her voice barely louder than a breath.
Arthur felt the ground vanish beneath his feet once again.
"What did you say?"
"Vance didn't take Beatrice here to lure you," Clara whispered, stepping back away from him toward the stone altar. "I leaked the location of the family crypt to Vance two weeks ago."
Arthur lowered his gun an inch, his mind refusing to process the words.
"Why?" he breathed. "Why would you do that?"
"Because the only way to destroy the syndicate was to bring every key player into the same room," Clara said, her voice turning completely cold.
She reached behind her waist, pulling out a second detonator that was wired directly into the thermite charges packed into the support pillars of the cathedral above.
"Clara, drop the switch!" Vance shouted, his arrogant composure instantly shattering into wild panic. "If those pillars blow, Trinity Church collapses into this crypt! We'll all be buried alive under two hundred feet of stone!"
"That was always the plan, Vance," Clara said with a terrifying, beautiful smile.
She looked at Arthur, her eyes burning with an intensity that took his breath away.
"You promised you would love me until death did us part, Arthur," she whispered.
Beatrice screamed through her gag, thrashing violently against her bonds as the thermite fuses began to hiss with blinding, white-hot sparks along the stone ceiling.
Vance raised his pistol to shoot Clara through the heart.
Arthur lunged forward, not toward Vance, and not toward the exit.
He dove straight toward Clara, his hands reaching for the detonator in her grip.
A gunshot cracked through the cavern.
A blossom of crimson erupted across Clara’s white silk collar.
Her eyes widened in shock as her finger clamped down hard on the red toggle switch.
The ancient stone ceiling began to tear apart above them in an avalanche of falling rock.
Arthur slammed into her falling body, wrapping his arms around her as the first ten-ton slab of granite plummeted directly toward their heads.
In the final microsecond before the darkness crushed them both, Clara reached up with her bloody hand and pressed something hard and cold into his palm.
May you like
"Forgive me," she whispered in his ear.
Then, the world caved in.
