Part 8: The Fire of Truth
The heat of the burning brewery above us was suffocating. Thick black smoke billowed through the opening of the basement door. The timer on the wall downstairs counted down the final seconds: 00:08... 00:07...
Helena Vance stood motionlessly at the top of the stairs. She looked at me and Luuk as if we were vermin to be exterminated permanently. Her hand holding the silver pistol was rock-steady.
"Mom..." whispered Luuk behind me. His small hand squeezed my fingers tight.
In that final second of despair, I didn't look at Helena's gun, but at Victor's body lying on the steps in front of me. His hand was still half over the military satellite phone with which he had just completed the transfer.
"You're too late, Helena," I said with a voice that sounded surprisingly hard in the confined space.
Helena frowned slightly. "What did you say?"
"The transfer is already complete," I said. I pointed not to the paper, but to the phone on the ground. "Victor didn't transfer the money to you. Nor to himself."
Helena's eyes glinted with panic. For the first time, I saw a crack in her iron mask. "That's impossible! He didn't know the master codes!"
"But I did," I lied with the highest stakes of my life. "Thirteen years ago, my sister didn't just give me the birth certificate. She gave me Julian's personal emergency code. The code that blocks everything if fraud is detected."
Helena looked doubtfully at the phone on the steps. That single second of hesitation was all we needed.
00:03...
From the smoke behind Helena, a figure suddenly emerged. It wasn't Frank, but Mark. My ex-husband.
His face was covered in soot, his shoulder drenched in blood from the earlier shot. With a wild scream, he threw himself on top of Helena. The silver pistol went off—a bullet ricocheted with a loud, sharp sound off the stone wall right above my head.
"Emma! Run!" shouted Mark as he struggled with the old woman. "Take the boy and go!"
Why Mark saved us at that moment, I didn't know. Maybe it was a final spark of humanity, or maybe he realized he had been used and discarded by Helena. It didn't matter.
I grabbed Luuk by the waist, half-lifted him, and sprinted past the struggling bodies of Mark and Helena out the basement door, into the burning hall of the brewery.
00:00.
The explosion beneath the floor wasn't one loud bang, but a series of dull, deafening shocks. The stone floor beneath our feet tore open. A pressure wave of fire and dust blew us forward.
I fell to the hard ground and rolled until I covered Luuk with my own body. Roof beams crashed down with a hellish din. Helena's shrieks and Mark's screams were swallowed by the sound of collapsing concrete.
When the noise finally subsided, a thick, suffocating blanket of gray dust and smoke lay over the ruin.
I coughed heavily, my lungs burning. "Luuk? Luuk, do you hear me?!"
Beneath me, the boy stirred. "I... I'm here, Mom. I'm alive."
I pushed a burned wooden beam off myself and got to my feet. The basement stairs we had just come out of had completely vanished under a mountain of hundreds of tons of rubble. No one left down there could have survived this.
"Here! Here they are!"
Through the smoke, I saw the bright beams of flashlights. Frank and two of his men were making their way through the wreckage. Frank looked battered, his face covered in cuts, but when he saw us standing there, he let out a visible sigh of relief.
"Mrs. Van Dijk! Thank God," said Frank, hurrying over to us and taking Luuk to steady him. "We have to leave now. The fire department and police are on the way, and in ten minutes this place will be swarming with media."
"It's over," I said, looking at the smoking pile of rubble. "Helena... Victor... Mark... they're all gone."
Frank looked at the collapsed basement and nodded slowly. "The Vance dynasty ended in the ashes tonight."
He pulled a black blanket around Luuk's shoulders and stared at me intensely. "But for you and Luuk, it's only just beginning, Emma. The transfer Victor started... I received the alerts on my equipment before the antennas collapsed. It went through."
I stared at him. "What does that mean?"
"It means Luuk is now officially the sole owner of the Vance empire," said Frank. "Tomorrow morning you will be the legal guardian of a fortune of over two billion euros."
Luuk looked from Frank to me. "Mom... what is that man saying? What's going to happen to us now?"
I grabbed Luuk's hand and knelt down before him. I wiped the soot from his forehead. For thirteen years, I had thought my life was standing still. But now I looked into my son's eyes and knew the real fight wasn't about billions, but about giving him a normal life.
"We're going home, Luuk," I said softly. "To Grandma."
But as Frank led us to the exit of the site, where the flashing lights of the first responders were already cutting through the night in the distance, the phone in my coat pocket vibrated.
It wasn't my own phone. It was Victor Vance's satellite phone, which I had slipped into my pocket in the confusion of the basement.
I pulled out the device. On the screen was an incoming text message from an unknown, international number.
I opened the message.
Did you really think Helena was the only head of the family, Emma? Congratulations on the money. See you soon in Zurich.
My blood froze again.
I looked up at the dark night sky. The trail of lies hadn't ended in the ruins of the brewery. It reached far across borders.
