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.

Darkness fell over the city like a lead curtain, broken only by the flash of emergency battery lights throughout Moretti Tower. Down on the riverfront, the freezing waters of Lake Michigan rushed into the subterranean spillways with the force of an unleashed deluge.

Vincent and Emma moved down the reinforced emergency stairwell, flanked by half a dozen of Vincent’s most loyal security operatives. Each man wore full black ceramic armor, their weapons fitted with high-intensity infrared lights that cut through the drifting dust. Every joint in the skyscraper screamed under unnatural shear stress.

"Reports from the lower levels!" Vincent demanded over the tactical channel.

"Lower Level Four is submerged, sir," answered an operative named Garza from the point position. "Level Six, where the historic archives meet the old Chicago Tunnel Company railway lines, has been completely breached. The intruder didn't ram us—they docked. They used a hydraulic docking collar that matched the 1950 municipal bulkhead seals to the millimeter."

Emma paused on the landing of the tenth floor sub-level, her hand tracing the damp, salt-crusted concrete wall. "They didn't break in; they had the counterpart keys. When I reversed the magnetic core to wipe Katherine’s ledger, I disabled the failsafe electromagnets that kept those old floodgates pressurized. I thought I was wiping her bloodline out of the banking mainframe. Instead, I opened the outer hatch for her masters."

"You did what you had to do to save the city from economic annihilation, Emma," Vincent said, stopping beside her, his dark eyes locked onto hers with absolute conviction. "The ledger was poison. If this thing in the water is the serpent that supplied it, then we kill the serpent."

They reached the heavy iron doors of Sub-Level Seven. The air here was bitter cold, smelling of stale lake silt, old oil, and the sharp ozone tang of ruptured conduits. Ahead of them, through the warped entrance of what had once been the bank’s subterranean bullion vault, an impossible sight emerged from the shadows.

A massive, black-iron hull—coated in frozen sludge and scarred by decades of underwater dormancy—protruded directly through the shattered reinforced concrete wall. Steam hissed from high-pressure pressure valves along its flank. A hatch, circular and heavy with antique brass locking lugs, began to turn with a terrifying, mechanical clatter.