Chapter 93: The Ice-Bound Dinner

The gunshot’s echo seemed to hang in the frozen air long after Rico vanished, absorbed by the hungry silence of the Alps. The wind howling through the shattered gallery was the only sound, a mournful chorus for the dead and the wounded.

Anton knelt on the cold stone, the world reduced to the circle of lamplight around Sabatine’s prone form. His hands, slick with blood, pressed the ruined silk of his scarf against the wound high on Sabatine’s shoulder. Each ragged breath Sabatine took was a victory, a defiance.

“Look at me,” Anton commanded, his voice stripped of all its billionaire’s polish, raw and guttural. “Stay with me.”

Sabatine’s eyes, clouded with pain, found his. “Told you… you’d get shot over pocket square,” he rasped, a flicker of the old defiance in the ghost of a smile.

A hysterical sound that was half-laugh, half-sob escaped Anton. “Not me. You. Always you.” He risked a glance at the doorway, expecting more threats, but there was only chaos. Evelyn was a weeping heap by the control panel, clutching her throat where Sabatine’s glass shard had pricked her. Marcus lay motionless, a dark stain spreading on the pale stone beneath him.

But the danger hadn’t passed. The digital clock on the monitor was frozen, but the wind was a new, unpredictable enemy. And somewhere in the villa’s depths, Rico was a loose cannon.

“We need to move,” Anton said, the strategist re-emerging through the panic. “We’re sitting ducks in this wind tunnel.” He looked around, spotting a set of double doors that likely led to the interior of the villa. “Can you stand?”

“Do I have a choice?” Sabatine grunted. With Anton’s help, he struggled to his feet, leaning heavily against him. The blood flow had slowed to an ooze, a good sign, but his face was ashen.

Supporting most of Sabatine’s weight, Anton half-carried, half-dragged him toward the doors, kicking them open. They stumbled into a stark, modern hallway, leaving the storm and the carnage behind. The comparative warmth and silence were disorienting.

They found a study, lined with books that looked unread and dominated by a massive steel desk. Anton eased Sabatine into a deep leather chair. “Don’t move,” he ordered, already rifling through the desk drawers. He found a first-aid kit, ludicrously small and pristine, meant for papercuts, not gunshot wounds. He tore it open anyway.

“This will hurt,” he warned, pouring antiseptic over a gauze pad.

Sabatine’s only response was a sharp intake of breath as Anton pressed the pad firmly against the wound, then began winding a bandage around his shoulder and chest with a clumsy, desperate efficiency. His fingers, used to signing billion-dollar deals, fumbled with the clips. Each touch was a silent apology.

“The prototype,” Sabatine muttered through clenched teeth. “Evelyn said it was here. A physical chip. We need it.”

“First, we need to stop the bleeding. Then we need to not die.” Anton’s voice was tight. He finished the bandage, his hands now trembling. He looked at Sabatine, really looked. The pallor, the sweat on his brow, the way his eyes struggled to focus. Shock. “You’re going into shock.”

“I’ve had worse,” Sabatine lied, his gaze drifting toward the door. “Rico…”

“It's a problem for later.” Anton shrugged out of his own coat, wrapping it around Sabatine’s front like a blanket. The intimacy of the gesture, the profound reversal of their roles, left them both wordless for a moment.

It was then they heard it. The slow, deliberate sound of applause.

Both men froze.

From a shadowed archway at the other end of the study, a figure emerged. Not Rico. It was a man in a dark, impeccably tailored suit, his salt-and-pepper hair swept back, his face a mask of polite, chilling amusement. He was older, perhaps in his late fifties, and he carried an air of absolute, unshakable authority. This was not a hired gun or a spiteful sibling. This was the architect.

“Bravo,” the man said, his voice a smooth, cultured baritone that seemed to absorb the tension in the room. “A truly dramatic finale. A little messier than I’d prefer, but one must make allowances for… passion.”

Anton straightened slowly, placing himself between the stranger and Sabatine. “Who are you?”

“A disappointed investor, Mr. Rogers. You may call me Mr. Silas.” He glanced dismissively at Sabatine. “And the infamous Mr. Stalker. Your reputation, it seems, is not entirely inflated. Pity you chose the wrong side.”

“The Aegis theft,” Anton said, his mind racing, connecting invisible wires. “Marcus and Evelyn… they were just your frontmen.”

“Frontmen, tools, children squabbling over shiny toys,” Silas sighed, moving to pour himself a drink from a crystal decanter on a sideboard. He didn’t offer them one. “The Aegis chip is remarkable, but it was never the real prize. It was the bait. The chaos it created within Rogers Industries, the plummeting stock, the board’s panic… that was the undervalued asset I sought to acquire. A company like yours, Mr. Rogers, weakened and desperate, is far more valuable than any single piece of technology. It can be stripped, repurposed, absorbed.”

The cold, vast scale of the betrayal stole Anton’s breath. It wasn’t revenge or greed. It was a corporate predator’s clinical dismantling.

“You killed my brother,” Anton said, the words hollow.

“Your brother killed himself with his own avarice and incompetence,” Silas corrected, taking a sip of whiskey. “Mr. Nadir’s intervention was… fortuitous, but ultimately irrelevant to the larger equation. As is your bodyguard’s increasingly tenuous hold on consciousness.”

Sabatine tried to push himself up in the chair, a low growl in his throat. Anton put a restraining hand on his good shoulder.

“What do you want?” Anton demanded.

“You have something I need,” Silas said, setting his glass down. “The master encryption key for your ‘black box’ projects. The ones not even on your Zurich servers. The failsafe vault, accessed only by your biometrics and a physical, personal code. The real crown jewels.”

Anton went very still. The existence of the vault was his deepest secret. Not even Evelyn had known its full purpose.

“Give it to me,” Silas continued, his voice dropping to a conversational tone that was more threatening than any shout, “and I will call off the remaining assets in the villa. You can take your wounded knight and try to get him to a hospital. Or, you can refuse.” He glanced at his watch. “The local authorities will arrive in approximately twelve minutes, alerted by the noise and the security breach. I will be gone. They will find a scene of a violent struggle between a disgraced spy and a rogue billionaire, over a stolen prototype. Mr. Nadir will have compelling evidence to offer. Mr. Stalker will not survive prison, and you… your empire will be mine regardless, piece by piece, in the ensuing scandal.”

The trap was perfect. It offered a sliver of hope—survival for Sabatine—at the cost of Anton’s soul, his life’s work, the very integrity he’d fought to protect.

Sabatine’s bloodshot eyes found Anton’s. He gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Don’t.

Anton looked from Sabatine’s pale, determined face to Silas’s calm, expectant one. The weight of a thousand decisions, a lifetime of choosing the company, the legacy, the cold, hard logic, pressed down on him. He saw his father’s disappointed ghost. He saw the empty penthouse. He saw the man in the chair, who had offered him not an empire, but a truth.

He reached slowly into his jacket.

Silas’s eyes gleamed with victory.

But Anton’s fingers didn’t go to a hidden compartment or a secret device. They closed around the platinum pen. He pulled it out, holding it up so the light caught its elegant lines.

“You’re right,” Anton said, his voice finding its old, steely resonance. “The vault is the prize. And this…” He twisted the cap. The faint violet light glowed. “…is the key that will lock you out of it forever.”

Silas’s smile faltered. “A recorder? How quaint. It changes nothing.”

“It changes everything,” Anton said, taking a step forward. “Because while you were explaining your grand strategy, this was transmitting every word to a private server, encrypted with a version of the Aegis protocol you so desperately wanted. My lawyers, the Swiss federal police, and three major financial regulatory bodies are now listening. You’re not a ghost, Silas. You’re a headline.”

For the first time, a crack appeared in Silas’s composure. His eyes darted toward the door, calculating his escape.

He never made it.

From the shadows of the archway he’d emerged from, Rico Nadir stepped silently back into view. His pistol was raised, not at Anton or Sabatine, but at Silas’s back. His face was a stone.

“Sorry, old man,” Rico said, his voice devoid of all emotion. “But the bid just changed. Rogers’s offer of full immunity and witness protection for me… it’s cleaner than whatever you had planned.” He looked past Silas to Sabatine, a flicker of the old, complicated camaraderie in his eyes. “And I owed him one.”

Silas stood perfectly still, understanding the complete collapse of his design. The sirens were audible now, growing closer.

Anton didn’t look at the man. He turned back to Sabatine, dropping to his knees beside the chair. The adrenaline was fading, leaving a bone-deep tremble in its wake. He cupped Sabatine’s cheek, his thumb stroking away a smear of blood.

“The ambulance is coming,” he whispered, the words a promise, a prayer.

Sabatine leaned into the touch, his eyes closing for a second. “Told you… the pen was a good weapon.”

Outside, the first blue and red lights strobed against the snow, painting the shattered gallery in pulses of emergency. The war wasn’t over. There would be interrogations, explanations, a mountain of legal and corporate fallout. But in the quiet of the study, with the architect of their ruin standing neutralized and the howl of the wind replaced by the wail of sirens, the only victory that mattered was the steady, stubborn beat of a heart under Anton’s bloodstained hands.

The dinner of ice and blades was finally over. The long, painful process of healing could begin.

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