Chapter 4 - The Shadow Behind the Silk
A sharp metallic click sounded right behind my ear.
The cold barrel of a revolver pressed firmly against the base of my skull.
"Don't move, Daniel," a quiet, familiar voice instructed. "Set your hands on the desk. Slowly."
I didn't turn around. I didn't need to. The scent of expensive Turkish tobacco gave him away instantly.
"Marcus," I breathed, my fists clenching until my knuckles cracked. "Thirty years. You were my best man at my wedding with Clara. You were going to be my best man tonight."
"And I still will be, if you just listen to reason," Marcus said smoothly, his voice lacking even a tremor of remorse. "Clara was never supposed to be found. The girl wasn't supposed to find that key. But children have a terrible habit of crawling into small spaces."
"You helped her," I said, staring at Vanessa, who was now straightening her disheveled dress with smug composure. "You forged the death certificate. You staged the car crash at Devil's Ridge. You made me identify a burned corpse with Clara's dental records."
"Dental records are remarkably easy to swap when you own the chief medical examiner of the county," Marcus said casually. "Your father left Blackwood Enterprises with fifty million dollars in unhedged debt, Daniel. Clara discovered the embezzlement. She wanted to go to the federal authorities. She wanted to clear her conscience, even if it destroyed your family name and bankrupted your child."
"So you buried her alive?"
"We preserved her," Vanessa corrected, stepping forward to gently stroke my cheek with the back of her manicured fingers. I pulled my head back in disgust, but Marcus pressed the gun harder into the nape of my neck. "We kept her fed. We kept her sedated. We needed her signature on the offshore trusts every six months to authorize the international transfers. Once the final tranche clears at midnight tonight, Blackwood Enterprises is completely solvent. We were going to relocate her to a private sanitarium in Switzerland. No harm was ever meant to come to her."
"You call this no harm?" I hissed. "She looks like a skeleton!"
"She's alive," Vanessa snapped. "Which is more than can be said for you if you don't sign the remaining power of attorney documents right now."
She reached into her briefcase and slammed a leather folder onto the desk, flipping to a signature page with a bold black 'X'. Beside it lay a gold Montblanc pen.
"Sign it, Daniel," Marcus whispered in my ear. "Sign it, and we walk Clara out through the back gates. You tell the guests it was an elaborate hallucination by a traumatized vagrant. Vanessa takes her share, leaves the country, and you get your broken little family back. Refuse... and Clara dies tonight for real. Along with that meddling little girl upstairs."
The mention of Lily ignited something feral deep inside me.
"You shouldn't have brought Lily into this," I said quietly.
May you like
"I didn't bring her into it. She brought herself," Marcus replied coldly. "Now sign the damn—"
I didn't pick up the pen. With a sudden, violent backward jerk of my skull, I slammed my head straight into Marcus's face.
