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 59 / 60

Chapter 59 - The Frozen Ascent

The utility tunnel was a forty-five-degree shaft cut straight up through twelve hundred feet of alpine bedrock, carrying an ancient steel cable funicular car designed for sanitarium staff in the winter of 1968.

Behind me, the lower levels were dying.

A terrifying, hissing roar rose from the depths—the sound of pressurized liquid nitrogen tanks bursting, freezing the air into sub-zero fog that would instantly crystallize the lungs of anyone left breathing in the rotunda. The Syndicate operators were screaming over their radios, their voices frantic, caught between the chemical fire and the arctic purge.

I scrambled into the open steel carriage of the funicular, found the manual emergency hoist lever, and hauled back on the counterweight brake with everything I had left.

With a bone-jarring shriek of rusted iron, the carriage shuddered, caught the gear teeth of the central rack, and began to lurch upward into the vertical dark.

The climb was agony.

Every ten yards, the cable slipped on its iced sheaves, dropping the car six inches with a sickening jolt that threatened to snap the aging wire. Below me, the tunnel began to fill with dense, white plumes of freezing nitrogen vapor, rising like an encroaching tide of death. The air grew impossibly cold; frost blossomed across the fabric of my trousers, and my breath crystallized in thick clouds against my eyelashes.

Gunshots echoed up the shaft.

Two Syndicate operators, their uniforms coated in white frost, had reached the foot of the funicular track. Tracers zipped past my head, ricocheting wildly off the granite walls with sharp, musical whines. One round punched through the floor of the steel carriage three inches from my boot, showering my face with iron filings.

I raised the captured submachine gun, leaned over the rusted rail, and fired blind into the fog below.

The muzzle flash illuminated the void for three violent seconds. A scream bounced off the wet stone, followed by the wet, heavy sound of a body tumbling down the steep concrete flume. The remaining fire ceased.

Ten minutes later, the funicular car slammed into the upper buffer blocks with a deafening crash.

I was thrown forward onto the frozen decking of the sanitarium’s upper observation deck—a forgotten concrete bunker perched on the sheer precipice of the mountain's north face, seven thousand feet above sea level.

The blizzard raged through the blown-out observation windows. The temperature was twenty below zero, but the air was clean, pure, and free of the reek of burning silicon and ancient blood.

I lay on the concrete, panting, clutching the satellite uplink and the single drive I had managed to pull from the console before the thermite ignited.

The Duncan dynasty was gone.

Jonathan was in federal prison. Julian was at the bottom of the Barents Sea. Constance was ashes beneath a tomb of liquid nitrogen. The Seventh Horizon mainframe had been melted into scrap metal.

I had survived.

Slowly, painfully, I dragged myself to my feet, leaning against the frozen sill of the observation window, looking out into the howling white wilderness of the Swiss Alps.