Chapter 13 - The Iron Hand
"Ethan, don't!" Elena wept. "She'll kill her anyway! She'll kill all of us!"
The timer on the desk blinked red: 04:15... 04:14...
Ethan looked down at the tablet. His fingers hovered over the digital keyboard. He looked up into his half-sister's crazed, desperate eyes.
"You're right, Victoria," Ethan said softly. "Our father was a monster. He destroyed you. And he almost destroyed me."
He slowly reached into his coat pocket.
The guards immediately raised their rifles, but Victoria held up a hand, watching him intently. "What is that?"
Ethan pulled out the small, smooth green sea pebble Lily had given him on the porch in Maine. He held it in his open palm, staring down at it with an expression of quiet, profound peace.
"Our father taught us that everything in this world has a price," Ethan whispered. "He taught us that family is a liability, and power is the only thing worth bleeding for. I believed him for thirty years. I built a glass cage in the sky and called it an empire."
The timer ticked down: 02:30... 02:29...
"Stop talking and type the code!" Victoria shouted, her hand reaching for the emergency manual winch release on the console.
"I won't type it," Ethan said, looking directly into her eyes. "Because Lily taught me what a father actually is."
With a movement so fast it defied human reaction, Ethan hurled the heavy granite pebble across the room.
It struck the main electrical junction box mounted on the wooden wall, shattering the glass breaker casing and short-circuiting the exposed high-voltage contacts.
A blinding blue arc of electricity exploded with a deafening bang.
The lights instantly died, plunging the office into pitch-black darkness, followed by the terrifying mechanical grind of the crane's emergency brakes locking up outside.
In the dark, Ethan moved like a ghost.
He drove his shoulder into the guard to his left, stripping the man's tactical knife, and spun, driving the blade deep into the second guard's weapon arm. Gunfire erupted blindly in the room, muzzle flashes illuminating the chaos in strobe-like bursts.
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Ethan lunged through the darkness, tackling Victoria across the desk. They crashed through the rain-slicked French doors of the second-story balcony, plummeting twenty feet down toward the wooden docks below.
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