She ordered me and my little girl out of “her house” on Christmas night, never realizing that her son owned the deed and was about to give her 30 days to leave.

“You think this vault makes you an emperor?” I interrupted, stepping forward, drawing the old man’s venomous eyes toward me. “You’re not a ruler, Vladimir. You’re an old, pathetic scavenger hiding in a hole in the ground, terrorizing a toddler because you failed at life.”

Vladimir’s eyes flared with rage. “You dare speak to me, you worthless commoner? You are nothing! A stray picked up from the gutter by my foolish grandson!”

“She is my wife,” Ethan said, his voice low and vibrating like thunder. “And she is the mother of the future Sovereign of this world. You, old man, are nothing more than a ghost whose time has passed.”

“We will see whose time has passed!” Vladimir sneered. He grabbed Lily’s arm, raising the ceremonial dagger toward her small wrist.

“Praetorians, execute them!”

“Down!” Ethan roared.

Before Vladimir’s guards could pull their triggers, Ethan threw a small, black sphere into the center of the room. It wasn’t a flashbang. It was an EMP charge tuned to biological interference frequencies.

A blinding, violet wave exploded outward. The lights in the chamber shattered instantly, throwing the entire hall into pitch-black chaos. The high-tech sights on the Praetorians’ weapons buzzed and died, their night-vision optics overloading and burning their eyes with white-hot sparks.

Shouts of agony and confused gunfire erupted in the darkness.

I didn’t need night vision. I knew exactly where my daughter was.

I sprinted blindly forward, sliding across the slick stone floor beneath a hail of ricocheting bullets. A guard stepped into my path; I drove the barrel of my rifle upward beneath his jaw,

firing once, and vaulted over his falling body.

“Lily!”

I collided with the chair, slicing the zip-ties binding her wrists with my combat knife. Lily threw her arms around my neck, burying her face into my collarbone, sobbing hysterically.

“I got you, baby, Mama’s got you!” I gasped, shielding her small body with my own armor as bullets tore chunks of rock from the pillar behind us.

Across the chamber, the sounds of hand-to-hand combat were brutal and deafening. Ethan was an unstoppable engine of destruction in the dark. The wet crunch of breaking bone, the sharp crack of snapping limbs, and the frantic, dying gasps of the Praetorian guard echoed like a nightmare throughout the hall.

One by one, the twelve elite soldiers fell.

A sudden flare of emergency backup lights flickered to life,

bathing the room in a sickly, crimson emergency glow.

Vladimir Vance stood alone before the vault door, his greatcoat torn, clutching the control console. His guards were dead, strewn across the floor in pools of blood. Ethan stood ten feet away from him, his combat vest shredded, blood dripping from his knuckles, but his eyes locked onto the old man with lethal intent.

“It’s over, Grandfather,” Ethan said, taking a slow step forward.

Vladimir stared at his grandson, then at me and Lily. A horrifying, broken cackle escaped the old man’s throat.

Chap 60

A deep, groaning vibration shuddered through the very bedrock beneath our feet.

Sirens began to wail in three different languages—Russian, English, and French—repeating a single, automated warning that sent an icy spike of dread straight into my spine:

*”Warning.

Structural integrity compromised. Primary sea-valves opened. Scuttle sequence initiated. Catastrophic inundation in four minutes.”*

“He’s flooding the entire complex!” I screamed, clutching Lily tightly against my chest.

Behind the obsidian vault, a massive set of hydraulic floodgates began to screech open. The sheer pressure of the Black Sea, hundreds of feet above us, slammed through the grates like a charging freight train. A wall of freezing, black water erupted into the lower sanctum, instantly swallowing the dead guards and rising to our knees within seconds.

Vladimir Vance didn’t try to flee. He stood laughing madly in the rising torrent, his arms outstretched as the churning water reached his waist. “Die with the empire, Ethan! Drown in the legacy you abandoned!”

Ethan closed the distance in a single, explosive stride. He caught Vladimir by the throat, hoisting the old tyrant completely out of the water, slamming him against the obsidian vault door.

“You gave up the right to die with honor when you touched my family,” Ethan growled.

He didn’t waste a bullet. Ethan cast the old man aside into the violent, swirling vortex of the open drainage shaft. Vladimir screamed once before the immense suction pulled him down into the subterranean abyss, vanishing beneath the foaming black tide.

“Ethan! The exit!” I yelled, fighting against the crushing current that was rapidly rising to my chest.

Lily was screaming in terror, her small arms choking my neck as the icy water lapped at her feet. “Daddy! The water is cold! Daddy!”