CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 59 — The Frozen Horizon
She crawled through the dark, narrow pipe for what felt like hours, her hands bleeding against the cold metal, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. The memory of the kitchen in Chicago, the courtrooms, the bank vaults—it all melted away into a single, primal instinct: survive.
When she finally pushed the rusty exhaust grate open, she tumbled out into a massive snowdrift.
The storm had passed. The sun was rising over the Alps, casting a blinding, brilliant gold light across the endless white peaks. The bunker below her was silent, a plume of dark gray smoke rising from a fissure in the mountainside like a dying breath.
Valeria stood up slowly, her body aching, her clothes scorched and torn. She was completely alone on the side of a mountain in a country where she officially didn't exist. The three billion dollars was gone. The Phoenix Alliance was compromised. Her father was dead. Her mother was buried in the dark.
She looked down at the steel watch on her wrist. The glass face was cracked, the digital screen dead.
May you like
She unfastened the buckle and let the watch drop into the deep snow, watching it sink until it was entirely swallowed by the white.
For the first time in thirty years, she owned nothing. And for the first time in thirty years, nobody owned her.
