Chapter 3 - THE QUEEN OF GLASS“Well,” Claire said, her voice dripping with artificial sweetness as she descended the first two steps of the iron staircase. “It looks like we missed the rehearsal dinner, Nathan. Though I must say, your interior design choices leave much to be desired, darling. This room smells like vinegar and peasant tears.”
Dominic didn’t look back at her. His gaze remained locked on Nathan, but the air around him seemed to drop ten degrees.
“Claire,” Dominic said, his voice dropping into a register so low it vibrated in the stone floor. “Put the bag down.”
“Or what?” Claire tilted her head, her blonde hair catching the harsh light of the flickering bulb. She reached into her coat pocket with her free hand, her fingers wrapping around something heavy and metallic. “You’ll shoot me? Right here in front of your favorite housekeeper and her little brat? Oh, Dominic, please. Let’s not be dramatic. We’re all adults here.”
With a swift, practiced motion, Claire drew a compact Beretta 950 Jetfire from her pocket and leveled it directly at Harper’s head.
Mia let out a choked, terrified sob, throwing her body over her daughter’s small frame to form a human shield.
“Don’t you dare touch her,” Mia wept, pressing her face into Harper’s curls. “Dom, please—don’t let them—”
“Drop the gun, Claire,” Dominic said, his hand still resting calmly inside his coat. He hadn’t flinched. He hadn’t even blinked.
“I wouldn't move my hand if I were you, Dominic,” Claire warned, her smile fading into a mask of pure ice. “The security feeds to this entire estate were routed to my tablet twenty minutes ago. The moment you walked into this cellar, I set a dead-man’s switch. If my heartbeat stops—or if I don’t press the override code every thirty minutes—the encrypted hard drives containing every tax evasion record, offshore wire transfer, and federal informant list belonging to the Vale Syndicate will automatically be emailed to the FBI field office in Manhattan, the U.S. Attorney General, and every major news outlet from here to London.”
Nathan let out a sharp laugh, recovering his composure as he stepped away from Marcus’s shotgun.
“You see, Dom?” Nathan said, wiping the last traces of blood from his chin. “You can kill us. You can feed us to the pigs in the valley. But the second you do, your empire evaporates into thin air. You’ll spend the rest of your natural life in a federal supermax cell wearing an orange jumpsuit while the government auctions off your father’s estate to pay back taxes.”
Marcus cursed under his breath, looking over his shoulder at Dominic. “Boss, don’t listen to them. I can take the shot—both of them, before she pulls the trigger.”
“And the tablet?” Dominic asked, his voice entirely devoid of fear. “Where is it, Claire? In your coat pocket?”
Claire’s smile returned, smug and untouchable. “It’s in the cloud, darling. Programmed to auto-release if my IP address disconnects from the local mesh network. You can’t shoot your way out of mathematics.”
Dominic looked at her for a long, agonizing moment. Then, slowly, a faint, dangerous smile touched the corners of his mouth.
“Mathematics,” Dominic repeated softly. “You’re a smart girl, Claire. You majored in finance at Wharton, you spent three years laundering money through Swiss shell accounts, and you managed to fool my inner circle for twenty-four months.”
“Thank you,” Claire purred, stepping down another stair. “It’s amazing what you can accomplish when a man is blinded by his own ego.”
“There’s just one problem with your math,” Dominic continued, his voice cutting through the damp air like a razor.
Claire’s smile falter for a fraction of a second. “What are you talking about?”
Dominic pulled his hand out from his coat.
He wasn’t holding a gun.
In his palm rested a small, black, military-grade satellite jammer, its indicator light blinking a steady, unbroken green.
“You forgot,” Dominic said smoothly, “that I didn't make my first billion in shipping ports, Claire. I started in telecommunications encryption and cyber warfare back in the nineties before I ever touched a dock in New York.”
The green light on the jammer suddenly blinked twice and turned solid red.
Claire’s face went completely, horrifically white. She whipped her hand down, pulling the tablet from her trench coat, her fingers frantically tapping the screen.
No Signal.
Network Error. Reconnecting...
“No,” Claire whispered, her voice cracking as panic seized her throat. “No, that’s impossible! The server is hosted in Zurich—it has triple redundancy—”
“It had triple redundancy,” Dominic corrected, taking one deliberate step toward her. “Until my tech team at Vale Cyber routed a localized EMP pulse through the estate’s secondary grid three minutes ago. Your tablet isn’t communicating with Zurich, Claire. It’s communicating with a dummy server sitting in a locked van parked three hundred feet down the driveway.”
Nathan lunged forward toward the stairs, screaming, “Claire, run!”
He didn't make it two steps.
Marcus’s heavy boot caught Nathan behind the knee, sending him crashing face-first onto the stone floor with a sickening crunch. Marcus pressed his boot firmly into the back of Nathan’s neck, pinning him to the ground.
May you like
Dominic walked past Nathan’s writhing body, stopping three feet away from Claire on the staircase.
She stared up at him, the Beretta trembling in her hand, the sophisticated veneer completely shattered, leaving only a cornered animal staring into the eyes of a wolf.
