Chapter 18 - The Fall of BabylonThe blast from the fiftieth floor was a magnificent, horrifying spectacle of orange and red fire. The shockwave hit our falling platform, slamming us against the steel grid and snapping one of the two main suspension cables with a sound like a thunderclap.
The cage tilted violently to a forty-five-degree angle, dangling over the street below by a single, frayed wire.
I screamed, my hands gripping the railing until my fingers turned purple. Roman had thrown himself flat against the floor of the platform, his body completely covering the bulge in his jacket where our daughter was hidden.
Debris—burning furniture, shattered glass, chunks of concrete—rained down around us like a meteor shower. A massive piece of the mahogany boardroom table crashed onto the top of our cage, denting the iron roof but saving our lives from the direct hit.
The platform swung wildly against the glass facade of the lower floors, smashing into the thirty-third floor windows before finally coming to a grinding, shuddering halt.
The silence that followed was suffocating, broken only by the distant, echoing sirens of the entire New York City emergency response fleet.
For a long moment, nobody moved.
“Roman?” I whispered, my voice cracked, my body covered in gray soot and tiny cuts from the glass rain. “Roman, please answer me.”
The tuxedo jacket stirred.
Roman slowly pushed himself up, coughing heavily. His face was bleeding from a cut near his eye, but his gaze was focused entirely on his chest. He carefully unzipped his jacket.
Clara Victoria looked up at him, her tiny face perfectly clean, her midnight blue eyes wide with curiosity. She didn't cry. She let out a small, soft coo, her tiny fist reaching up to touch her father’s bloody jaw.
Roman let out a ragged, sobbing breath, pressing his forehead against the baby’s chest. “She’s okay. Bianca... she’s okay.”
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I crawled over to them, throwing my arms around my husband and my child. We lay there on the floor of a ruined window-washing cage, thirty stories above the concrete, covered in the ash of the old Kane empire, but we were alive.
The old world had burned to the ground. And from its ashes, something entirely new was about to be born.
