Everyone watched Victoria raise her hand against a helpless elderly woman, but only one waitress dared to stop her—and seconds later, Chicago’s most powerful billionaire walked straight toward them. / Chapter 114 / 191

Chapter 114 - The Iron Foundry of Gary

The industrial graveyard of Gary, Indiana, sprawled beneath a low canopy of rust-colored clouds. Here, where the historic steel mills had long decayed into skeletal iron frames and cracked concrete slabs, Vincent Moretti maintained his ultimate fallback position: Foundry Seven. To the public, it was an abandoned smelting facility purchased by a shell corporation during the 2008 recession. In reality, it was a hardened bunker equipped with independent power generators, satellite uplinks, and subterranean escape tunnels stretching all the way to the rail lines.

The armored SUV swept through the rusted perimeter gates, which swung shut behind them with the heavy clank of hydraulic deadbolts. Armed men in unmarked tactical gear saluted as Vincent stepped down, his wound roughly sutured and bandaged under a fresh black sweater.

Inside the sprawling machine shop, old Sofia Ward—Emma’s grandmother—sat wrapped in a wool shawl beside a glowing wood-burning stove. Her face was lined with the trials of eight decades, but her eyes were razor-sharp. When Emma stepped through the threshold, the old woman rose with trembling grace and gathered her granddaughter into a fierce, tearful embrace.

"I felt the lake tremble, Emma," the grandmother whispered, kissing Emma’s cold cheeks. "I knew she had found the chamber."

"Katherine was there, Grandma," Emma replied, her voice thick with emotion. "She wore the council’s seal. She demanded the drive."

Sofia's gaze hardened, drifting toward Vincent. "And my sister?"

"Escaped across the ice shelf," Vincent said, pulling out a heavy chair for Emma before sitting down across from the matriarch. "Her forces were scattered, but she has already unleashed the Council’s legal apparatus. They've seized Moretti assets nationwide. Emma and I are currently fugitives under federal treason warrants."

Sofia laughed, a dry, rasping sound that had no humor in it. "Of course she did. Katherine never fights with her fists if she can use a corrupt judge or a bought-and-paid-for bureaucrat. But she made one critical mistake."

"What mistake?" Emma asked, pulling the satellite drive from her pocket and setting it on the scarred wooden table between them.

Sofia reached into her blouse and pulled out an old silver locket on a tarnished chain. She popped open the latch with her fingernail, revealing not a photograph, but a micro-miniature magnetic tape spool no larger than a grain of rice.

"Katherine thinks the Core Vault was designed to protect the Council’s wealth," Sofia said. "She forgot that our father was the chief engineer of the Federal Reserve’s emergency continuity vaults during the Cold War. The Core Vault beneath Lake Michigan is not a bank vault, Emma. It is a guillotine."

Vincent leaned forward, his interest intensely piqued. "A guillotine?"

"Every illicit transaction, every bribed senator, every foreign destabilization campaign funded by the Sovereign Council since 1954 was mirrored and logged onto the deep servers," Sofia revealed. "Katherine needs your drive to overwrite the logs before the global financial clearinghouses execute their annual sovereign audit tonight at midnight. If the drive is plugged into the Master Clearing Terminal at the Chicago Board of Trade before twelve o'clock, the entire global structure of the Sovereign Council will self-execute. Their accounts will be liquidated and redistributed to public treasuries across the globe."

"And if Katherine gets the drive first?" Emma asked.

"She erases the ledger, rewrites the global debts in her own name, and becomes the sole, untouchable ruler of modern commerce."

Carter entered the room, his face dark with urgency. "Mr. Moretti. Radar picked up three low-altitude helicopters crossing the state line from Illinois. No transponders. They’re running black-ops signatures. They've pinpointed our power generators."