Chapter 66 - Chloe's Awakening
When I returned to Safehouse 4B, the air inside was thick with tension. Liam was pacing the floorboards with his hands in his hair, while Chloe sat upright on the edge of the bed, her face white, her eyes burning with a feverish intensity.
Evelyn was wrapped in a dry towel, nursing hungrily.
"What did they say?" Chloe demanded the moment the deadbolt clicked into place behind me. "Mrs. Miller, tell me."
I didn't sugarcoat it. I laid the silver envelope on the table beside the shotgun and Father Donald’s silver box. I told them every word Von Berg had spoken in the diner. I told them about the ten million dollars. I told them about the indictment papers already drafted against Liam. I told them about the baptismal trap.
Liam sank onto the folding chair, his face buried in his hands. "We're dead," he choked out. "They have the banks. They have the police. Mom, they can frame me for wire fraud in ten minutes. I signed those papers Chloe brought home from that loan broker three months ago... God, I was so stupid. I just wanted to show you I could provide. I wanted to prove I didn't need your permission to own a house."
"Shut up, Liam," Chloe said.
Liam froze, lifting his head.
Chloe wasn't crying anymore. The timid, self-indulgent girl who had whined about the Tupperware in my pantry and demanded the master bedroom had vanished. Her hair was tangled, her hospital gown was stained with milk and sweat, but her eyes were fixed on the silver envelope on the table with pure hatred.
"Ten million dollars to sell our daughter to a group of Swiss ghosts?" Chloe stood up slowly, ignoring the sharp wince of pain from her pelvic stitches, holding Evelyn firmly against her ribs. "They think because I liked nice things, because I was petty about your house, that I would sell my baby?"
She walked across the bare floorboards, stopped at the table, picked up the cream envelope, and threw it directly into the cast-iron woodstove in the corner. Within seconds, the paper caught fire, curling into black flakes of ash.
"Chloe..." Liam breathed.
"I was an idiot, Mrs. Miller," Chloe said, looking directly at me, her chin raised, tears finally brimming but refusing to fall. "I thought you were just a bitter old woman trying to control us. I didn't understand what you were protecting. But this is my daughter. Nobody takes her. Nobody."
I looked at my daughter-in-law. For the first time since Liam had introduced her to me two years ago, I saw the blood of an equal standing before me.
"Then we don't run," I said, opening Father Donald’s silver box and lifting out the cold iron seal of 1872. "We don't negotiate. And we don't go to their chapel."
May you like
"Then where do we go?" Liam asked, his voice shaking with a sudden surge of adrenaline.
"We go to the one place they cannot enter without triggering the sovereign counter-breach," I replied, loading three shells into the heavy Ithaca shotgun on the table. "We take Evelyn back to Elm Street."
