Chapter 12 - The Queen of the Board—The Coma Lie
I stared at the woman in the limousine, my mind fracturing into a thousand pieces.
“Mom?” I choked out, clutching Ellie and Leo behind me. “You… you’ve been in a coma.”
My mother, Eleanor Kingsley, smiled. It was a cold, reptilian expression. “A medically induced coma is a wonderful alibi, Mara. While Silas and Julian fought like dogs over the scraps of the empire, no one ever suspected the sleeping queen.”
She snapped her fingers. Four armed men stepped out of the limousine, surrounding us in the alley.
“Take the children,” Eleanor ordered.
“No!” I screamed, backing against the brick wall. “You can't have them! Julian and Silas are dead! The money is gone! The trust liquidated!”
Eleanor laughed softly, stepping out of the car under a black umbrella held by a guard.
“Oh, my sweet, naive girl,” Eleanor sighed. “Did you really think the Kingsley empire was built on a banking trust? That fifty billion was just the public-facing corporate shell. It was bait. I let Julian and Silas kill each other over it.”
She walked closer, her expensive perfume masking the smell of the dirty alleyway.
“The real power isn't in bank accounts, Mara,” Eleanor whispered. “It’s in the global intelligence network your father built. The blackmail files on half the senators in Washington, the European prime ministers, the tech billionaires. That network is worth ten times what was in the vault. And the only way to inherit control of that network… is through the purest bloodline of the next generation.”
She looked down at Ellie and Leo with hungry, obsessive eyes.
“Julian was a brute. Silas was an idiot,” Eleanor said. “But these children? Born of my son’s blood and my daughter’s womb? They are the perfect genetic heirs. I will raise them to rule the world.”
A guard lunged forward and ripped Ellie from my arms.
“Mommy!” Ellie shrieked, kicking wildly.
Another guard grabbed Leo.
I fought like a wild animal. I clawed at the guards, screaming, but one of them struck me across the jaw with the butt of his rifle. I collapsed to the wet pavement, my vision exploding in white flashes of pain.
“You’re a monster,” I spat blood onto her designer shoes. “I will hunt you down. I will kill you.”
“You won’t live through the night, Mara,” Eleanor said, turning back to the limousine. “Finish her, and make it look like a mugging gone wrong.”
Eleanor climbed into the car with my crying children. The limousine sped out of the alley.
I lay bleeding on the concrete as two guards racked the slides of their pistols, aiming down at my head.
“Nothing personal, Miss Kingsley,” the lead guard said.
A sudden, ear-splitting gunshot echoed through the alley.
But it didn't come from the guards.
The lead guard dropped dead. The second guard spun around, but another shot took him perfectly in the chest.
From the shadows of the fire escape above, a man dropped down to the pavement holding a smoking sniper rifle.
He walked over to me, offering a gloved hand.
I looked up, stunned.
It was Aris Thorne.
“I told you, Mara,” Aris said grimly. “Your father funded my clinic for a reason. Get up. We have a limousine to catch.”
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