Chapter 17 - The Ghost of Manhattan
Three hours later, inside a heavily fortified safe house hidden beneath an unassuming brownstone in Brooklyn, Emily sat at a steel table, stitching a deep laceration on Daniel’s shoulder with surgical precision.
Her hands never wavered. Growing up in the neglected corners of the outer boroughs had taught her how to dress bullet wounds and treat trauma long before she had ever worn a designer dress.
"She killed him, Em," Daniel said, staring blankly at the brick wall, his fists clenched so hard his knuckles had torn through his skin. "All these years, I thought Dad pushed his luck with stress and corporate wars. But Helena poisoned him like a stray animal. And she’s going to use his own fleet to bring down everything he built."
Harrison entered the room, holding an encrypted satellite tablet. His tactical gear was scorched, his face covered in soot, but his eyes were blazing with tactical readiness.
"Boss. Miss Emily. We pulled the black box from the helicopter’s transponder before Helena scrambled the signal," Harrison reported. "She’s not heading for Europe. She’s landed at a private pier in Port Newark. The *Arthur Sterling I*—our flagship liquefied natural gas supertanker—is currently docked there, loaded with eighty thousand metric tons of pressurized fuel."
Emily froze, the surgical needle hovering in mid-air. "An LNG tanker of that scale... if ignited in New York Harbor, the blast radius would wipe out lower Manhattan and the financial district."
"She’s not going to blow it up," Emily realized suddenly, her eyes widening with sheer horror as she connected the financial dots. "She doesn't want to destroy the city. She’s hijacking the tanker and threatening to detonate it unless the Sterling board signs over the sovereign ownership of the entire maritime logistics division! It’s the ultimate extortion. She’s holding eight million lives hostage to force our unconditional surrender."
Daniel stood up, ignoring the tearing pain in his stitched shoulder. He pulled on a fresh black tactical shirt and strapped on his shoulder holster with deliberate, terrifying calm.
"She thinks she’s fighting the Arthur Sterling of twenty years ago," Daniel said, his voice echoing off the concrete walls like a death sentence. "She thinks she’s facing a broken man who will negotiate to protect his reputation."
Daniel walked over to the weapons locker, pulling out two suppressed submachine guns and tossing one to Emily. She caught it cleanly, racking the slide with effortless familiarity.
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"She doesn't know who we are," Emily said, her emerald eyes burning with an unholy fire. "She thinks we're her victims. Let's go show our father’s murderer what happens when you corner a Sterling."
***
