Chapter 24 - the scar that wasn't there
Clara stopped in her tracks, her breath catching in her throat. Her gaze dropped from the woman’s emerald eyes to the hollow of her collarbone.
Her mother had suffered a severe burn during a laboratory fire at Northwestern University when she was nineteen years old. It had left a jagged, raised white scar across her right clavicle—a mark Clara had traced with her tiny fingers every night before bed as a child.
The woman standing before them had smooth, unblemished skin beneath the collar of her velvet gown.
"You're not Eleanor," Clara whispered, stepping backward toward Roman as an icy dread washed over her. "Who are you?"
The woman's frantic expression vanished in an instant. The grief, the maternal longing, the trembling desperation melted away into a cold, mocking smirk. She straightened her posture, the posture of a trained operative rather than a broken mother.
"Gregory always said the girl was far too observant for her own good," the woman said in a flat, unaccented tone.
From the dark hallway outside the study, the heavy metallic click of semi-automatic rifles racked into battery shattered the silence.
"Down!" Roman roared, grabbing Clara by the collar of her coat and dragging her behind the massive mahogany desk just as a deafening burst of automatic gunfire tore through the oak doors.
Splinters of antique wood and clouds of plaster exploded across the room. The large bay windows shattered into a million glittering shards as bullets tore the velvet armchair to ribbons. The woman in emerald silk ducked nimbly behind a reinforced steel safe door built into the rear bookcase, completely vanished from sight.
"It was an ambush from the start!" Roman shouted over the thunderous echoes of gunshots, pulling a secondary clip from his tactical vest. He returned fire through the splintered doorway, dropping the first advancing gunman in the corridor with two precise shots to the center mass.
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"The courier... the photo..." Clara gasped, pressing her back against the heavy desk as drywall rained down upon her head.
"A bait operation to draw us off the grid," Roman said grimly, leaning out to fire three more suppressive rounds into the hall. "They knew I would bring you here personally. They wanted us both out of the city, cut off from my private security network."
