Everyone warned Laura never to touch Marco Bellini’s father’s chair, but when his heart device started beeping, she cut it open and uncovered a terrifying secret… / Chapter 66 / 100

Chapter 66 - The Genesis Chamber

The outer hatch of the escape bell hissed open, spilling us out onto a grated walkway suspended over an immense subterranean reservoir.

The air here was completely different from the Leviathan’s stale, ozone-scorched atmosphere. It smelled of ancient dust, damp stone, and cold machine oil—like a cathedral that had been buried alive a century ago. Tall, arched concrete pillars rose into the gloom, illuminated by low-voltage sodium lamps that flickered along a narrow catwalk.

“Where are we?” I whispered, supporting Marco as he leaned heavily against my side, limping step by step along the iron grating.

“We’re beneath the old water intake cribs,” Marco said, looking around the cavernous space with dark recognition. “The ones built in the 1890s off the coast of Chicago. My grandfather’s construction firm held the municipal contract to seal them off in the fifties. Everyone thought they were filled with concrete.”

“They weren't,” I murmured, shining a small penlight across the walls.

Carved directly into the foundation stones were two family crests, intertwined like serpents: the roaring lion of the Bellini syndicate, and the geometric compass of Vance Industries.

They hadn't just been rivals who turned on each other; they had been architects of the same empire.

We reached a heavy iron door at the end of the catwalk. It had no modern retinal scanner, no biometric keypad. In the center of the door was a simple, circular mechanical lock shaped like a seven-spoke wheel.

Marco stopped. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the heavy brass pocket watch his father, Samuel Bellini, had left him—the one that had stopped at 3:17 AM. He snapped open the back casing, revealing a set of notched brass gears that mirrored the tumblers on the door.

“He told me never to open this unless the family fell,” Marco whispered. “He said the key to the empire was carried by a dying man.”

He inserted the back of the watch into the center of the wheel and turned it clockwise.

*Click. Clack. Chunk.*

Heavy counterweights dropped inside the concrete frame. The massive iron door swung inward on greased counter-levers, revealing a vast, circular room bathed in amber light.

In the center of the room, positioned beneath a massive glass skylight that looked up into the murky, churning waters of Lake Michigan fifty feet above, sat a single piece of furniture.

An exact replica of the leather wingback chair from Samuel Bellini’s study.