Chapter 101 - The Edge of the Abyss
The spray from the weir froze instantly on our faces as the wind whipped off the gorge. Behind us, the orange glow of Oak Ridge’s funeral pyre cast long, skeletal shadows across the rocky ridge. The estate was gone, fifty years of arrogance and deception collapsing into a mountain of ash and embers.
Julian stood balanced on the rotten edge of the spillway beam, swaying slightly against the buffeting wind. He held the canvas bag out over the roaring black chasm.
"In Montreal, in the vault beneath Lock 11," Julian said, his voice cutting through the roar of the falls, "there isn't just money. There are the confessions Arthur forced our mother to sign before he put her in the ground. The confessions that prove Melissa wasn't even Arthur's child. She was born from the affair that destroyed this house."
My breath caught in my throat. The final, hideous truth of the Van Der Bilt household fell into place with brutal clarity. Melissa’s entitlement, Evelyn’s obsessive shielding of her, the endless cover-ups—it wasn't about preserving the bloodline; it was about hiding the shame that Arthur had spent his entire life trying to erase.
"Take the key, Katherine," Julian whispered, extending his arm toward me. "Take it, and finish what Arthur was too cowardly to face. Or let the river have it all."
I took a single, cautious step forward across the slick granite, reaching my hand out toward the cold brass key. My fingers were barely inches from the metal when a sharp, deafening crack tore through the pine woods behind us.
It was not Vance’s gun.
A rifle shot echoed from the dark timber higher up the ridge. The bullet struck the wooden beam beside Julian’s boot with an explosive spray of splinters. Julian flinched, his footing slipping on the ice-covered moss. His arms flailed as the canvas bag slipped from his grasp, tumbling down into the roaring black abyss of the weir.
"Down! Sniper!" Vance screamed, tackling me to the freezing ground just as a second round whistled through the mist where my head had been a second before.
Julian caught himself on the edge of the iron cable, dangling over the churning water, his fingers slipping against the frost. The brass key bounced once off the stone ledge, skittering to a stop right at the edge of the drop.
Through the scope of a rifle resting in the dense hemlocks fifty yards above us, a red laser sight swept across the rocks. From the darkness of the trees, a voice we thought was locked behind federal steel in Albany rang out, cold, desperate, and laden with madness:
May you like
"Nobody takes my boys' inheritance. Nobody."
Melissa had never made it to Albany. And she wasn't alone.
