Chapter 58 - The Sister in the Cargo Hold
"You just don't know how to die, do you, June?" Claire hissed, her finger tightening on the trigger. "You were supposed to stay in that hospital room. You were supposed to take the insurance payout and be the pathetic, broken thing you always were."
"I was never broken, Claire," I said, my voice steady, rising above the roar of the fire and the scream of the scuttling alarms. "You were just too terrified to admit that without Dad’s money and Mom’s lies, you are absolutely nothing."
Claire pulled the trigger.
The hammer clicked on an empty chamber.
Her eyes dilated in sudden, wild disbelief. She racked the slide frantically, but nothing ejected.
Behind her, leaning against the doorway of the lower machine room, was Thomas. In his bloody hand, he held the magazine she had left on the workbench when she was loading her cases thirty minutes ago.
"You should check your brass before you leave the table, Claire," Thomas said coldly, spitting blood onto the deck.
Claire’s expression warped from arrogant superiority into pure, animal fury. She swung the heavy steel pistol like a club, aiming straight for my temple.
I didn't duck. I stepped inside her swing, blocking her forearm with my left wrist, and drove my right palm upward into her nose with every ounce of rage, betrayal, and suffocated silence that had been building inside my chest for twenty-eight years.
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The sound of cartilage snapping was sharp and clean.
Claire shrieked, stumbling backward into the safety netting. The Pelican case slipped from her grasp, tumbling down the open hatchway and crashing onto the lower iron deck, its latches popping open to scatter millions of dollars in sovereign paper bonds and handwritten ledgers into the rising, oily bilge water below.
