Three hundred wealthy guests watched a maid stop Vanessa’s attack with one hand, never realizing the woman in the gray uniform had once been trained to dismantle dangerous threats. / Chapter 80 / 130

Chapter 80 - The Arctic Abyss

Naomi rose to her feet, wiping a smear of blood from her mouth with the back of her hand. Her uniform was shredded, her breathing heavy, but her stance was completely unshaken. She looked up at Vanessa on the balcony.

"You brought a machine to do a human’s job, Vanessa," Naomi said, her voice cutting through the hollow vault like a razor.

Ethan dragged himself to the mainframe terminal, his fingers rapidly entering the final bypass sequence. "Naomi! The coolant tanks are overloading! The entire ice shelf is going to destabilize in less than two minutes!"

Vanessa turned to run toward the upper extraction lift, terror finally overriding her arrogance. But the steel gantry shook violently beneath her feet as a massive explosion ripped through the lower drainage tunnels. The facility was tearing itself apart from the foundations up.

Naomi vaulted onto the staircase, closing the distance between them in seconds. Vanessa scrambled toward the emergency elevator, but Naomi’s hand shot out—the same unbreakable, iron grip that had seized her heel in the ballroom—and clamped around Vanessa’s coat collar, slamming her against the steel mesh of the lift cage.

"Let me go!" Vanessa shrieked, clawing at Naomi’s arm. "You don't understand! Julian isn't in Switzerland! He never went to Europe!"

Naomi stared into her wild, terrified eyes, tightening her grip. "Where is he, Vanessa?"

"He’s already inside Whitmore House!" Vanessa screamed over the deafening groan of the collapsing bedrock. "He never wanted the Leviathan! The Leviathan was a distraction! The true archive... the apex ledger that controls every global syndicate... it was buried beneath the Whitmore estate forty years ago! My father put it there! Julian has the entire house surrounded right now!"

Before Naomi could extract another word, the floor beneath them fractured with a sound like a splitting mountain.

A massive crack cleaved the concrete straight down the center of the vault. The cryo-pods tumbled into the black water rising from the sea below as the Arctic ice shelf completely collapsed. The entire structure leaned sixty degrees into the abyss, throwing Naomi, Vanessa, and Ethan across the violently tilting deck.

Through the shattered blast doors above, the heavy rotor blades of a massive, unmarked stealth tiltrotor gunship descended through the snowstorm, its spotlight pinning Naomi against the collapsing edge of the ice cliff.