Chapter 2 - The Bloody Gamble
The agonizing bite of two dozen razor-sharp glass shards sliced instantly into my palms and forearms. Blood bloomed across the white tile in bright, crimson pools.
Vance jumped back instinctively, cursing as a spray of blood splashed across his polished leather dress shoes. Beatrice let out a genuine shriek of horror, clutching her pearls and retreating into the hallway to protect her dress.
"You crazy bitch!" Vance shouted, waving his hand in disgust. "Look at what you've done! You're bleeding all over the marble!"
"She's completely unhinged, Vance!" Beatrice called out from the hallway, her voice trembling with indignation. "Get her out of the main house before the guests see her! The caterers are arriving at the back gate!"
While Vance looked away in disgust and Arthur stepped back to keep his wife calm, I kept my hands buried in the glass beneath my body. Using the blinding pain as cover, I squeezed my right hand shut inside my pocket.
I jammed the cracked casing of the fob against a heavy, jagged piece of mirror tile lying on the floor.
Crunch.
The sharp glass sheared away the broken plastic lip that was jamming the button.
My thumb slipped into the cleared cavity.
Click.
A faint, invisible vibration pulsed against my hip. The first signal sent.
Click.
The second vibration.
Click.
The third and final pulse clicked.
A high-frequency satellite burst cleared my cardigan, punching through the Sterling estate's heavy concrete walls, shooting straight up into the dark sky, locking my exact GPS coordinates to Marcus’s tactical unit.
Response time for an armed tactical unit deploying from the federal staging depot across the river was twenty-two minutes under optimal conditions.
I had to survive twenty-two minutes inside a house filled with armed bodyguards, corrupt corporate titans, and a husband who wanted me silenced forever.
"Get up!" Vance barked, grabbing my cardigan by the scruff of the neck and dragging me to my feet. The pain in my sliced palms made my vision swim with black spots, but I forced myself to remain conscious.
He slammed me against the hallway wall, completely unaware that his own dress shirt was now smeared with my blood. He didn't search my pocket; he was too thoroughly disgusted by the gore dripping from my fingers.
"Take her down to the wine cellar in the basement," Arthur said coldly from behind his son, taking another sip of his scotch. "Lock the reinforced door. We will deal with her after the board meeting and dinner conclude."
"And what about the blood on the floor, Arthur?" Beatrice demanded, stepping back into view with a damp towel. "It looks like a slaughterhouse!"
"Tell the domestic staff she had a dizzy spell and tripped," Arthur replied smoothly, his face utterly unbothered. "We'll have a private physician come by late tonight to stitch her up before we process her transfer to the private psychiatric clinic in Vermont."
A private psychiatric clinic.
That was their ultimate plan. Once they declared me mentally incompetent, Arthur and Vance would assume total control of my personal estate, including the small piece of ancestral land my grandfather had left me—land that I had recently discovered sat directly atop the illegal shipping route Vance was using to move unmanifested cargo through the state.
May you like
Vance dragged me down the carpeted grand staircase toward the basement level. Every step was a agony of searing pain from my palms, but I kept my hands tucked tightly against my chest, feeling the quiet, steady pulse of the distress fob resting against my ribcage.
The countdown had begun. Twenty-one minutes remaining.
