He stood at my shoulder, holding my hand, his thumb tracing my knuckles, his eyes cold as flint:
“You told Kendra through the wall that Olivia never realizes anything until it’s too late, Vanessa,” Ethan said softly:
“You were wrong. She realized everything in time to send you to a federal penitentiary.”
Before the marshals could haul Arthur Vance toward the gantry, Marcus Cooper’s encrypted satellite radio shrieked with an urgent, high-gain acoustic alarm from his vest:
*BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.*
Cooper flipped the receiver, his voice snapping into immediate tactical alert:
“Admiral Mercer! Chancellor Mercer! Flash priority intercept from the subterranean intake at Valve Station Ten beneath the Newport coastal cliffs!”
Cooper turned the terminal screen toward where we stood:
The live thermal reconnaissance feed showed three heavy commercial crane trucks and two specialized tracked core-drilling rigs bearing the corporate insignia of **Apex Strategic Demolition // Vaduz, Liechtenstein** parked eighty feet beneath our ancestral shoreline!
