Chapter 31 - The Cradle of Glass
The gale-force wind screamed across the wooden planks of Dock 4 as Daniel and I moved through the shadows of the dry-docked hulls. Rain lashed against my skin like needles, but my focus was locked on the gangway twenty yards ahead.
Daniel drew his sidearm, keeping low behind a stack of industrial lobster traps. "Elizabeth, stay behind me. When I engage the sentries, you run for the harbormaster’s office and lock the door."
"I'm not running, Daniel," I said, my voice dead and steady. "That baby is my blood. Whatever crime created her, she isn't leaving this harbor."
Before Daniel could argue, a sudden burst of suppressed gunfire shattered the night.
The two guards at the gangplank didn't fall from our shots—they collapsed inward, blood spraying against the white fiberglass hull of the yacht as high-caliber rounds punched through their chests from the darkness of the neighboring fuel dock.
"Sniper!" Daniel yelled, shoving me down behind the heavy wooden pilings as bullets began chewing through the timber above our heads.
Through the rain and muzzle smoke, a third figure emerged from the yacht's cabin onto the aft deck.
It wasn't a corporate lawyer. It wasn't Harold Vogel.
It was a tall, elderly man wrapped in a heavy charcoal wool overcoat, his silver hair slicked back against the driving rain. He walked with a heavy gold-topped cane, his movements steady, measured, and entirely unhurried, as if the gunfire around him were nothing more than a summer drizzle.
He turned toward our position, his face illuminated for a fraction of a second by the flash of a Coast Guard flare exploding high in the storm clouds above the bay.
My breath stopped in my throat. My heart froze in my chest.
The face staring across the dock was the face from the oil paintings in the Vance boardroom. The face on the foundation plaques at St. Jude's. The face of the man whose empty tomb we had blown to pieces in the family crypt forty-eight hours ago.
Arthur Vance Senior was alive.
He looked directly into my eyes through the rain, an ancient, terrifying smile curving his thin lips. He raised his cane, pointing the brass tip toward me in a mock salute, before turning back toward the cabin door where Chloe stood waiting with the child.
"Welcome to the family, Elizabeth," his voice drifted across the water through the wind, amplified by the ship's public address system. "Did you really think I would leave my empire to children?"
The yacht's mooring lines snapped under hydraulic tension, the massive screws churning the bay into a white-water vortex as the vessel pulled away from the dock, accelerating into the black, storm-swept void of the open Atlantic.
May you like
Daniel lunged to his feet, firing three rounds into the receding stern, but the armored glass deflected the lead like hail.
Fifty yards out, the boat vanished into the blinding wall of rain and fog, carrying my biological father, my sister, and the child born from our stolen blood into international waters—leaving Daniel and me standing on the broken edge of the pier as the sirens of the Coast Guard cutter finally wailed through the storm, hopelessly, fatally too late.
