Chapter 11 - The Bloodline Broken
The silence that followed was suffocating. Camille stared up at the screen in horrified confusion, her hands trembling against her belly. Eleanor lowered her gun by an inch, her face twisting into a mask of pure disbelief. Arthur stood up slowly, leaning over the polished glass desk, savoring the absolute destruction of Eleanor’s carefully laid dynastic plans. He revealed that Eleanor had spent years orchestrating Julian’s marriage to Camille to secure the Vance fortune, oblivious to the fact that Arthur had sabotaged the clinic records from the very beginning.
Before Eleanor could scream, the vault doors behind them slammed shut with deafening force. Julian and Thomas had reached the chamber entrance, beating violently against the reinforced bulletproof glass. Julian’s face was twisted in psychotic desperation; he held a Molotov cocktail improvised from an antique cognac bottle, the cloth wick already flickering with an angry blue flame. He screamed through the glass, demanding the master codes to the offshore accounts or he would ignite the gas lines running along the cellar ceiling.
Arthur glanced at his monitors with cold indifference, dismissing Julian as a common thug who lacked the vision to wield true power. But Vivienne noticed something Arthur had overlooked: a flashing red warning icon on the secondary console. Julian had already severed the estate’s main ventilation intake, and smoke was beginning to pour into the sealed vault through the air ducts. Arthur reached for the override lever, but Eleanor fired a single shot, the bullet shattering the control console into a shower of bright electrical sparks.
