Chapter 27 - The Sixty-Second Inferno
"Rose, move!" Nathaniel’s roar shattered the paralyzing shock that gripped the room.
The crimson digits on the hotel’s emergency consoles flashed relentlessly: *00:48... 00:47... 00:46...*
The blast doors had sealed shut with two feet of reinforced titanium; there was no pursuing Eleanor and Victoria down the private bunker shaft. The main elevators were electronically dead, and the fire stairs had already been bolted from the inside by Eleanor’s system override. They were suspended six hundred feet above the city in a glass cage rigged to vaporize in less than forty seconds.
"The exterior scaffolding!" Rose shouted, her mind snapping into pure survival instinct. She pointed toward the far wall of the conservatory, where industrial floor-to-ceiling glass overlooked the southern spire. Just beyond the tempered panels hung the motorized window-washing gondola used for the penthouse exterior.
Nathaniel didn't hesitate. He seized a heavy wrought-iron pedestal from an overturned marble statue, swung with every ounce of his towering frame, and slammed it against the glass. The impact sent a spiderweb of hairline fractures across the reinforced pane, but it held.
*00:32... 00:31...*
"Stand back!" Rose drew the heavy sidearm she had stripped from Arthur’s fallen bodyguard, leveled the barrel at the central fracture, and fired four high-caliber hollow-point rounds in rapid succession.
The glass buckled. Nathaniel threw his shoulder into the weakened core with a ferocious heave. The entire ten-foot panel exploded outward into the freezing night sky, raining glittering crystalline shards down into the abyss.
Wind shrieked into the conservatory, whipping Rose’s dark hair across her face and catching the hem of her ruined emerald gown. Down below, the lights of the metropolis looked like distant stars. The maintenance gondola was swinging violently three feet below the threshold, battered by the gale.
*00:15... 00:14...*
"Jump, Rose! I'm right behind you!" Nathaniel barked, grabbing her waist and hoisting her over the shattered ledge.
Rose launched herself into the void, landing hard on the corrugated steel floor of the suspended cradle. Her knees buckled under the jarring impact, but she scrambled to the emergency control box. Nathaniel vaulted the railing just as the internal sirens shifted from a rhythmic pulse to a solid, deafening scream.
*00:03... 00:02... 00:01...*
Rose slammed her fist down on the manual cable-release lever.
The motorized locks disengaged. The gondola went into a stomach-churning free fall, dropping fifty feet down the vertical steel guide cables just as the Grand Regent’s penthouse erupted.
A blinding fireball blew out every window on the top four floors. A wall of superheated air and concussive thunder slammed into the falling platform, nearly tearing it from its tracks. The steel cables shrieked in protest, sparks showering into the darkness like falling meteors. Nathaniel threw his body over Rose, shielding her head and torso as chunks of molten metal and shattered masonry rained past them into the void.
When the secondary emergency brakes finally bit into the guide rails with a gut-wrenching screech, the platform swung violently, fifty stories up, dangling in the smoking shadow of the burning tower.
Nathaniel raised his head, his face smudged with soot, a jagged cut bleeding freely across his temple. His eyes locked onto Rose, wild and blazing.
"You're alive," he breathed, his voice raw.
May you like
Rose reached up, her soot-stained fingers gripping his collar, pulling him down until their foreheads rested against each other amid the roaring wind. "We're both alive. But your mother just declared war on the world."
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