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 38 / 60

Chapter 38 - The Pressure Chamber

I stepped forward to the master terminal. The chill radiating from the liquid nitrogen tanks raised goosebumps beneath my thermal suit.

The console was split into two operator stations. On the right was an optical scanner paired with a deep-well biometric ring cradle. On the left sat an analog, mechanical keyway marked with the Duncan family viper.

"Ten minutes remaining," the synthetic computer voice droned overhead. **00:09:59... 00:09:58...**

"Insert your hand, Evelyn," Victoria ordered from the gantry above. "Clara, take your place at the left terminal."

Clara moved with agonizing slowness, her eyes flicking toward the massive pressure gauges mounted along the perimeter wall. The needle on the primary hydraulic manifold was quivering in the red zone; the structural stress on the underwater vault was already nearing its maximum tolerance.

I placed my right hand onto the glass plate. The surface was freezing. A green laser line swept slowly from the base of my wrist to the tips of my fingers.

`BIOMETRIC CONFIRMED: DUNCAN, EVELYN. ACCESS LEVEL: CONSORT.`

"Now the ring," Victoria commanded, her voice tightening with an edge of raw, desperate hunger. She was leaning over the rail now, her ebony cane forgotten against the balustrade. All her aristocratic composure had evaporated, replaced by the naked, ravenous greed that defined the entire Duncan bloodline. "Seat the ring into the cradle!"

I slipped the platinum band off my finger. The metal felt heavy, laden with the weight of every lie Jonathan had ever told me, every terror I had survived in his house of glass.

I lowered it toward the cradle, but I did not drop it in.

"You said earlier that revenge is a hollow diet, Victoria," I said, my voice ringing clear and steady through the rotunda.

Victoria froze. "What are you doing? Drop the ring!"

"You forgot one thing about Jonathan," Clara said from the left console, her hand gripping the heavy iron key. "He hated you more than he hated us. He hated you for making him what he was."

"Shoot them!" Victoria shrieked to her guards.

Before the men could squeeze their triggers, Clara jammed the iron key into the slot and wrenched it viciously to the left.

At the exact same instant, I slammed Jonathan’s ring into the purge slot marked *CORPUS MORTIS*.

A klaxon sounded—not the shrill electronic alarm of a digital error, but a deafening, mechanical foghorn that reverberated through the very plates of the floor.

`SCUTTLE SEQUENCE INITIATED. EMERGENCY BALLAST PURGE ENGAGED.`

Above us, the high-pressure hydraulic lines feeding the upper observation deck violently ruptured. A jet of sea water, pressurized at four thousand pounds per square inch, sheared through the acrylic ceiling of the gantry like a diamond saw.

The scream from Victoria’s guard was cut short as the immense hydraulic pressure tore him across the catwalk. The second guard fired wildly, his bullets ricocheting harmlessly off the console’s reinforced casing, before a second jet of black water slammed into him, smashing his body into the structural steel.

Victoria clung to the railing, her silk scarf torn away, her face twisted in a mask of absolute fury and terror as the freezing water engulfed the upper level.

"You fools!" she screamed through the roar of cascading water. "The hull cannot hold! We are three thousand meters down!"