Chapter 40 - The Glass Abyss
I didn't turn immediately. I kept my eyes locked on her.
"Turn around, Clara," Helena hissed.
I stepped to the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Lake Geneva.
Parked across the street, in front of the Grand Théâtre, sat a black ambulance with its emergency lights flashing silently.
My encrypted burner phone vibrated against my hip.
I pulled it out and pressed answer.
It was not Captain Briggs from Kentucky. It was a voice I had not heard in fourteen years. A voice that had been declared dead in a hospital fire outside Boston when I was eighteen years old.
"Clara," the woman whispered, breathing through an oxygen mask.
My lungs froze. The world went dead silent.
"Mom?" I choked out.
"Helena didn't take your children, Clara," the voice wheezed, weak, broken, and terrified. "They are safe in Kentucky. But she took me. She’s had me in this sanitarium for fourteen years to keep your father in line. She told him I died of smoke inhalation."
I spun around to face Helena.
The old woman was sitting back in her leather chair, her smile returned, terrifyingly serene. She raised her right hand, holding a small digital detonator with a steady red beacon flashing on its tip.
"Your father Arthur didn't betray you because he was greedy, Clara," Helena whispered with absolute delight. "He betrayed you because I promised him that if he delivered Julian and Vanessa into my game, I would finally let his real wife come home."
She tilted her head, her fingers tightening around the switch.
"Now, my brilliant sovereign," Helena said, her eyes gleaming with madness and triumph. "You have sixty seconds to sign the master custody transfer of the entire Vance empire to me... or the ambulance across the lake ceases to exist, and your mother burns for a second time."
The digital clock on the conference room wall began to count down from sixty.
*00:00:59... 00:00:58... 00:00:57...*
I looked at the pen in Helena's hand, then out the glass at the flashing lights of the ambulance across the frozen water.
May you like
My move had destroyed their facade.
Now, the monster was demanding my soul.
