I was the daughter who paid the $1,845 mortgage every month, yet my parents told me to become independent while my 35-year-old brother lived rent-free—then, less than 24 hours after I left, I discovered they’d already given away my bedroom while still expecting me to fund their house. / Chapter 76 / 90

Chapter 76 - The Surface Sabotage

Seven miles above, the bitter winter wind howled across the snow-dusted grounds of Ridge Road. Inside the detached garage that concealed the entrance to Sub-Level 1, Donald Vance stood over Arthur, who was tied to a steel structural column, his face bruised and bleeding.

"You should have kept your nose in probate court, cousin," Donald sneered, kicking Arthur's chair back against the concrete wall. "Cassidy thought she was smart because she could balance an Excel spreadsheet. But this family was built on power, not accounting."

Arthur spat a mouthful of blood onto Donald’s clean leather boots. "You're a coward, Donald. You've spent thirty-five years hiding behind your mother's apron strings, living off Cassidy's labor. You don't even know what you’re standing on."

"I know it's worth fifty million dollars," Donald said, turning toward the leader of the private security team, a burly contractor named Miller. "How long until the charges are set on the collar?"

"Two minutes, Mr. Vance," Miller replied, checking the digital detonator in his hand. "We’ve placed four pounds of C-4 around the primary pneumatic stabilizer tubes. Once they blow, the shaft will collapse inward, sealing the deep shaft beneath twenty floors of crushed granite. Nobody survives down there. It’ll look like an old mine subsidence."

Behind them, Eleanor Vance stood in the doorway of the garage, wrapped in a thick mink coat, her hands clutching a designer purse. Her face was hollow, eyes darting nervously toward the main house. "Donald... Donald, are you sure Cassidy is down there? We just wanted her to sign the quitclaim deed. We didn't... this wasn't the plan."

"Shut up, Mother!" Donald barked, rounding on her with a snarl. "The plan went out the window the moment she hired forensic auditors! She found the accounts. She was never going to pay another dime. If she comes back up that shaft, we both go to federal prison for thirty years for what you did to Dad! You want to die in a federal penitentiary, old woman? Or do you want to keep the house?"

Eleanor shrank back, her lips trembling, her gaze dropping to the floor in cowardly complicity. She said nothing more.

Miller stepped toward the shaft rim. "Arming the detonators. Ten seconds."

Down in the communications terminal at the bottom of the world, Cassidy was not trying to disarm the explosives. She was typing furiously into the Boreas operational console, using her administrative clearance to rewrite the pressure-relief parameters.

"Cassie, what are you doing?" Richard asked, leaning heavily against the console beside her, his breath ragged.

"The $1,845 monthly transfer didn't just maintain the air scrubbers, Dad," Cassidy said, her eyes tracking the surging red bars on the thermal graphic. "It maintained the geothermal bypass loops. When Eleanor diverted power away from the cooling arrays to save money for Donald’s sports cars, she created a three-thousand-pound head of superheated volcanic steam in Bypass Vent 3. The only thing holding it back is this manual magnetic gate."

She brought up the schematic of the shaft head directly beneath the detached garage where Donald and his mercenaries were standing.

"They want to collapse the shaft downward," Cassidy said, her finger hovering over the manual release icon. "I’m going to vent the pressure upward."

`COMMAND: THERMAL BYPASS VENT 3 — RAPID PURGE.`

`WARNING: WILL CAUSE CATSTROPHIC STRUCTURAL DISRUPTION AT SURFACE APEX.`

`AUTHORIZATION KEY: VANCE-CASSIDY-1845.`