“Still pretending to be a soldier?” my brother laughed as my entire family humiliated me at our backyard barbecue, but seconds later, a V-22 Osprey landed outside, two officers saluted me, and my father finally realized he had no idea who his daughter really was. / Chapter 58 / 100

Chapter 58 - The Iron Barbecue

"DAD, NO!"

The scream didn't come from me. It didn't come from Vance.

It came from the entrance of the rotunda.

Jake Carter was standing in the doorway, his bare feet bleeding onto the concrete, his face pale with horror. He had crawled out of his cell, dragging his bruised body through the bodies in the corridor, driven by some lingering, desperate shred of familial terror.

Arthur’s gaze flicked to Jake for a fraction of a second.

That fraction of a second was all I needed.

I lunged forward, vaulting over the ballistic barrier with every ounce of strength left in my legs. I slammed into Arthur with the full weight of my tactical gear, driving him off the command platform and down into the sunken center of the rotunda.

We hit the concrete together. The heavy revolver flew from his grip, skidding across the floor and dropping into the drainage grate beneath the central holographic projector.

Arthur rolled, surprisingly fast for a man his age. He didn't fight like a civilian; he fought like the Cold War operative he had been forty years ago. He drove a hard palm strike toward my chin, attempting to snap my head back, but I deflected the blow with my forearm, driving a short, vicious elbow into his ribs.

I heard two ribs crack. Arthur gasped, a ragged wheeze escaping his lungs, but his eyes remained burning with fanatical fury.

He reached for my throat, his thumbs digging into my carotid arteries with desperate, killing force.

"You... ungrateful... bitch!" he hissed, his face inches from mine, his spit landing on my cheek. "Everything I built... everything I sacrificed... was for this family!"

"You didn't build a family, Arthur," I choked out, my vision tunneling as the blood flow to my brain was pinched. "You built a cartel!"

I brought both hands up inside his grip, slamming my forearms outward with a violent circular strike that broke his hold on my throat. Before he could recover, I grabbed his lapels, pulled him forward, and slammed my forehead directly into the bridge of his nose.

Bone shattered with a crunch that echoed off the consoles.

Arthur fell back onto his elbows, blood gushing from his broken nose, his wire-rimmed glasses hanging by one ear. He stared up at me, dazed, coughing, his suit ruined with blood and dust.

I stood over him, my chest heaving, the combat knife held firmly in my reverse grip, its blade hovering six inches above his heart.

Silence settled over the Command Rotunda, heavy and suffocating.

Beside the console, the silver USB drive sat on the desk where Jake had dropped it. The red tendrils on the holographic globe were continuing their march, forty percent complete, fifty percent complete.

"Do it," Arthur whispered, a bloody, defiant grin spreading across his broken teeth. "Kill your father, Major Carter. Prove that you’re the monster I trained you to be. Squeeze the trigger. Plunge the blade. Show them that Arthur Carter’s daughter is the deadliest thing on this planet."

I looked at him. I looked at the man who had sat at the head of the table three months ago, watching my brothers mock my service, watching me be humiliated while he quietly planned the destruction of the nation I had bled for.

I felt the rage—ten years of cold isolation, ten years of feeling like an outcast in my own bloodline, burning in my chest like white phosphorus.

It would be so easy. One downward thrust, and the architect of Tartarus would be erased forever.

My knuckles turned white around the hilt of the knife.

Then, I took a slow, deep breath of the mountain air.

I slid the knife back into its sheath on my vest.

"No," I said, my voice dropping to a calm, icy whisper. "Death is too clean for you, Arthur. You wanted to be remembered as the great visionary who rebuilt the world. You’re going to be remembered as a disgraced, senile traitor who spent his final years in a six-by-eight cell beneath ADX Florence, wearing an orange jumpsuit, eating cold oatmeal out of a plastic tray."

Arthur’s eyes widened with genuine horror. For the first time, the defiance vanished, replaced by the sheer, unadulterated dread of a proud patriarch facing absolute humiliation.

"No," he begged, his voice finally breaking. "Elena... shoot me. As a soldier... give me a soldier’s death!"