Chapter 5 - The Glass Threshold
The sound was sharp, brittle, and unmistakable. Someone had forced the French doors leading into the glass conservatory at the rear of the house.
Eleanor shoved the flash drive deep into the pocket of her cardigan. “Clara, listen to me. Don’t make a sound. You stay behind the armoire in the corner. If anyone opens this door, you do not speak.”
“Mom, don’t go down there!” Clara sobbed, tears spilling silently down her pale cheeks. “He’s not alone. He always has Marcus with him.”
Marcus. Julian’s private security chief, a brutal man who had spent a decade enforcing silence for the Vance family. Eleanor’s face hardened, the soft worry of a mother vanishing behind a mask of stone.
“They are in my home,” Eleanor said, her voice dropping to a terrifyingly calm register. “This house has stood for a hundred years before Julian Vance was born. Stay put.”
She slipped into the corridor. She didn’t turn on a single light. Eleanor knew every inch of this house in the pitch blackness—which boards creaked, which doorways cast long shadows, and where her late husband had kept his hunting equipment. She slipped into the study, unlocked the bottom glass cabinet, and retrieved a heavy steel fireplace poker, its tip pointed and blackened from decades of embers.
May you like
As she crept toward the conservatory, a flashlight beam swept across the ceiling. Heavy boots were crossing the polished parquet floor.
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