My future husband thought marrying me would protect his billion-dollar empire and bury his financial crimes forever, until the chapel doors opened and a woman he claimed was dead walked inside. / Chapter 34 / 60

Chapter 34 - The Flight Across the Arctic Rift

The Gulfstream G650 sliced through the gray troposphere at forty-five thousand feet, leaving the patchwork green of the European continent behind for the blinding, desolate expanse of the Norwegian Sea. Below us, clouds parted occasionally to reveal vast floes of pack ice floating on water so black it looked like an ocean of liquid slate.

Clara sat opposite me in the cabin, cleaning the slide of a suppressed Heckler & Koch P30 pistol provided by Victoria’s armorer. The rhythmic *click-clack* of the steel slide was the only sound competing with the dull drone of the Rolls-Royce turbofans.

"She’s lying about something," Clara said quietly, not looking up from her weapon.

"She's lying about everything," I agreed, staring down at the tablet computer resting on my knees. It displayed the architectural schematics of Deep Horizon. The facility was an engineering monstrosity: a reinforced titanium sphere anchored into the basalt bedrock of the Greenland-Iceland-Norwegian trench, powered by a closed-loop geothermal vent.

"The vault doesn't just hold sovereign debt," Clara continued, snapping the magazine into the grip with a sharp *thwack*. "I spent five years digging through Jonathan’s off-the-books ledgers. The sovereign families don't use cryogenic drives just for bonds. Deep Horizon is where they store the *Omnis* registry."

"The Omnis registry?"

"The kompromat," Clara whispered, leaning across the aisle. "Every bribe, every manufactured war, every assassinated politician, every falsified corporate audit across six decades. Jonathan didn't rule the Apex board because he was brilliant. He ruled them because he held the keys to the vault containing their absolute destruction. If Victoria gets her hands on those drives, she doesn't just restore the Duncan empire—she becomes the undisputed sovereign of Europe's shadow government."

I looked toward the front of the cabin. The heavy mahogany door separating us from Victoria’s private stateroom remained firmly latched. Two silent guards stood outside, their arms folded, MP5 submachine guns slung across their chests.

"Then we can't let her have it," I said, my voice dropping to a whisper. "We disarm Jonathan’s failsafe to stop the economic collapse, but we don't hand the registry over to Victoria. We purge the servers entirely."

"If we purge the servers," Clara warned, "Victoria will kill us before our diving suit helmets even clear the airlock."

"She’ll kill us anyway," I said, meeting her eyes. "The moment my retina unlocks that terminal and your marriage certificate verifies the seed phrase, our utility ends. She called us 'girls' on the phone. To her, we're just biological keys. Once a lock is turned, you don't keep the key on the mantle; you throw it in the river so no one else can open the door."

Clara smiled—a grim, feral smirk that showed the iron beneath the scars. "Then we make sure the lock bites back."

The pilot’s voice crackled through the cabin intercom: *"Descent initiated toward Station Thule. Ground temperature is negative thirty-two Celsius. Sea state at the deployment rig is rough, waves running six to eight meters. Prepare for rough transition to the tethered submersible."*