Chapter 185 - The Matriarch's Ghost
Emma pulled Maya behind her back, her shoulder pressed against the frozen granite wall of the creek bank. She stood to her full height, her hand hidden in her pocket, clutching the cold titanium cylinder.
"Where is she, Thomas?" Emma demanded, her voice shaking with rage rather than fear. "What did you do to my mother?"
Thomas took two slow steps forward, the snow crunching beneath his polished boots. In his good hand, he held a sleek, nickel-plated revolver. "Eleanor is back on the ice, where she belongs. The emergency crews have already pulled two bodies from the water near the boathouse. Local news will report it as a tragic family dispute—a Christmas reunion that soured into violence, fueled by a mother's mental breakdown."
He stopped five paces away, the muzzle of his gun leveling directly at Emma’s forehead.
"You should have stayed in Albany, Emma," Thomas continued, shaking his head with a look of mock disappointment. "You could have lived a quiet, mediocre life as a clerk or an accountant. But you had to bring this child back into Eleanor's parlor. You had to remind Eleanor that she wasn't the last Vance."
"She’s a child!" Emma screamed. "She's your own blood!"
"She is an operational liability," Thomas replied coldly. "Under the 1978 Geneva indenture, any legitimate heir born to your mother's direct bloodline inherits the voting control of the Vance holdings upon turning seven years old. Maya turns seven in two weeks. Which means my seventy-percent stake becomes subject to a board audit that I cannot survive."
Maya peeked around Emma’s coat, her little face pale and streaked with tears. "You're the mean man," she whispered, her voice surprisingly steady. "Grandma said you stole the houses. Grandma said you were a thief."
Thomas’s cold expression twitched. A flash of ugly, bitter anger contorted his features. "Grandma was an ornament, little girl. A decorative piece I kept around to keep the trust compliant. But she is gone now. Hand me the cylinder, Emma. Give it to me, and I might allow you to walk away from this mountain alive. You can take the girl to Boston. Change your names. Disappear."
"You won't let us walk," Emma said, staring into his pale eyes. "You didn't let Claire walk."
Thomas's smile was razor-thin. "Claire had the same stubborn, stupid light in her eyes that you have right now. She thought principles were worth dying for. She learned differently in the snow outside Saint-Armand."
He raised the hammer of the revolver with a deliberate, metallic *click*.
"The cylinder, Emma. Now."
"Don't do it, Mommy," Maya whispered, her small fingers wrapping around Emma's wrist.
Emma looked down at the snow between them. Ten feet to her left, the frozen surface of the creek was thin, covered in a deceptive dusting of powder over dark, rushing mountain water. She remembered what Eleanor had told her before the explosion: *When the wolf thinks he has cornered the lamb, that is when you let the pack see its throat.*
"You want it?" Emma said, pulling the titanium cylinder from her coat and raising it high above her head. "Catch it."
With all the strength left in her aching body, Emma threw the cylinder not toward Thomas, but high into the air, over the brittle ice directly above the deep churn of the falls below.
Thomas’s instincts betrayed him. For all his aristocratic calm, forty years of greed lived in that tube. His eyes widened, and he lunged laterally across the ice to snatch the titanium capsule from the air before it plunged into the black water.
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His heavy boots struck the thin shelf.
A sound like a rifle shot cracked through the creek bed as the black ice fractured beneath his weight.
