Chapter 31 - The Matriarch’s Invitation
The Geneva mist clung to the surface of the lake like cold gauze, muffling the rhythmic slap of water against the ferry’s hull. Every instinct honed over months of terror told me to turn around, to grab Clara’s arm, vault the low stern railing, and vanish into the labyrinthine alleys of the Old Town. But survival among the Duncans had taught me a far more brutal lesson: you cannot outrun a shadow when the person casting it owns the sun.
"Diplomatic plates," Clara murmured, her knuckles whitening as she gripped the cold iron rail beside me. Her eyes, shadowed by exhaustion and years of living as a ghost, were fixed on the black limousines idling at the quayside. "Canton of Geneva, but the crest on the pennant... that isn’t the Swiss Confederation. It’s the two-headed viper. The old Duncan heraldry. Jonathan stopped using that crest six years ago because he thought it was archaic."
"Because it wasn't his to use," I replied, the elderly woman’s voice from the satellite phone still echoing inside my skull. Crisp. Aristocratic. Chillingly amused. *You did remarkably well with my son, girls.*
The ferry gave a low, shuddering moan as the crew tossed thick hemp mooring lines over the bollards. The gangway slammed down with a resounding metallic clang that sounded like the drop of a guillotine blade.
The elderly chauffeur stepped forward. He did not rush, nor did he look around with the nervous vigilance of a bodyguard expecting a shootout. He moved with the terrifying serenity of someone who operated entirely outside the jurisdiction of mortal law. His silver hair was cropped with military precision, his charcoal overcoat tailored to conceal a weapon without breaking the clean drape of the wool.
"Madame Duncan," he said, bowing his head slightly as Clara and I stepped onto the wet asphalt. He addressed Clara first—a subtle, calculated acknowledgment of her status as the first wife, the woman legally pronounced dead half a decade ago. Then his eyes shifted to me. "Madame Evelyn. Madame Victoria requests the honor of your company for breakfast. She has taken a suite at the Villa Diodati."
"Victoria Duncan died of congestive heart failure in a private clinic in Zurich three years before Jonathan and I were married," Clara said, her voice dropping to a dangerous, flat register. "I attended her memorial. Jonathan scattered her ashes across the Engadin valley."
The chauffeur offered a polite, humorless smile. "Mr. Jonathan was always an exceptionally gifted stage manager, Madame. But stage managers do not write the plays. Please. The morning air off the lake is notoriously unkind to the chest."
He held open the door to the center limousine. The interior was lined with hand-stitched Connolly leather, smelling faintly of dried lavender, aged tobacco, and polished cedar.
Clara looked at me. In that shared glance passed an entire lexicon of unspoken understanding. We had unseated Jonathan. We had bled his accounts dry, turned his allies into prosecutors, and left him pacing the cage of a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute. But we had only lopped off the serpent’s head; we had not realized the beast possessed a second, far older heart.
"If we run," I whispered, "we spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders in third-tier border towns, waiting for a poisoned umbrella or a rigged elevator."
"Then we don't run," Clara whispered back, her jaw hardening into sculpted marble. "We finish it."
We climbed into the vehicle. The door shut with a heavy, vacuum-sealed thud, cutting off the sound of the waking city completely. The glass was so thick the outside world warped into a distorted smear of pastel facades and gray water. Within seconds, the convoy accelerated smoothly away from the docks, sweeping up the winding curves of Cologny toward the historic estates overlooking the lake.
The Villa Diodati loomed behind wrought-iron gates that swung open automatically at our approach. It was here, two centuries earlier, that Lord Byron and Mary Shelley had spent a stormy summer inventing monsters. The irony was not lost on me as the limousine pulled up before the colonnaded portico.
We were led through towering double doors into a grand drawing room where floor-to-ceiling windows framed the gray expanse of Lake Geneva. Before an immense limestone fireplace sat an elderly woman in an ivory cashmere sweater and pearls the size of sparrow eggs. Her hair was silver spun into silk, swept back from high, predatory cheekbones that mirrored Jonathan’s with horrifying fidelity.
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"Sit, please," Victoria Duncan said without looking up from the porcelain teacup balanced delicately in her palm. "You both look dreadfully undernourished. Revenge is a notoriously hollow diet."
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