Chapter 128 - The Legacy of Betrayal
Emma stepped in front of the glass, her gaze piercing through the scratched polycarbonate pane. "Dmitry! The Sterlings didn't build anything! Your father was a puppet for Vorontsov’s council, living off the interest of stolen imperial reserves while everyday people starved in the neighborhoods!"
Dmitry let out a harsh, bitter bark of laughter. "Puppets? We were kings, Emma! Your grandmother was too weak to use the power she controlled. She hid in the shadows, playing the noble martyr while my father and Katherine turned Chicago into our private mint! But Katherine became careless. She let you find the ledger. She let Moretti step in."
He tapped the screen of the tablet in his hand. Across the engineering bay, warning klaxons began to scream in ear-splitting cadence.
*Ballast tanks venting. Mooring clamps breaking in four minutes.*
"Dmitry, if you vent those tanks, the suction will rip through the river barrier and flood half the Loop!" Vincent shouted through the intercom microphone. "You'll drown the city you wanted to rule!"
"If I cannot rule Chicago, Moretti, no one will," Dmitry replied coldly. "The Sovereign Council has already authorized the erasure of the American asset portfolio. In three minutes, the auxiliary reactor will go critical, vaporizing the waterfront and creating a tsunami that will wash the entire downtown district into the lake. I have an escape pod in the forward torpedo bay. You two have four minutes of air."
With a final sneer, Dmitry turned away from the observation window and disappeared into the forward compartment, locking the secondary blast doors behind him.
"Vincent, the reactor manual vents!" Emma pointed toward a massive bronze wheel mounted above the central reactor core, sealed behind a cage of interlocking steel gears. "My grandmother’s signet ring—the inner band has a hexagonal key profile! It's designed to override the manual lockout!"
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"Then we turn it," Vincent said, pulling a crowbar from a nearby emergency tool rack. "Marco! Do you copy? Get every man out of the basement and up to street level! Sound the evacuation bells across the lower floors! Now!"
***
