Chapter 22 - The Ghost of Lake Michigan
The wind off Lake Michigan was vicious, biting through the damp lace of my ruined wedding gown. But the cold outside was nothing compared to the ice flooding my veins as I stared at the woman standing on the boat’s deck.
"Mom?" The word tore from my throat, broken and raw.
She looked exactly as she had in the photograph Nicholas had shown me in the basement archives—the same high cheekbones, the same sharp, calculating hazel eyes. But she wasn't a victim. She wasn't the broken woman Eleanor Sterling had supposedly crushed twenty-five years ago. She wore a tailored black tactical coat, her silver-streaked hair pulled tight into a severe knot.
Her hand holding the silenced Walther PPK didn't waver by a millimeter. And the barrel was pointed directly at my father’s heart.
"You took your time, Arthur," my mother said. Her voice was smooth, devoid of warmth, sounding like velvet dragged over broken glass. "I half-expected you to let Eleanor turn you into ash up there."
"Julianne," my father rasped, his chest heaving as he leaned heavily against Nicholas. His face was gray beneath the soot and blood. "Lower the weapon. Our daughter is here."
"I see her," Julianne replied, her gaze flicking to me for a fraction of a second. Her eyes assessed my shorn, jagged hair, my stained and torn dress, the bruises darkening my collarbones. There was no motherly horror in that look, no tears, no instinct to comfort. Only cold evaluation. "She has your jawline, Arthur. Pity. It always was your most stubborn feature."
"Mom, what is this?" I screamed, stepping forward, but Nicholas caught my wrist, pulling me behind the broad line of his shoulders.
"Stay back, Clara," Nicholas warned, his voice low, vibrating with lethal tension. He stared at Julianne with fierce recognition. "You weren't supposed to be here. The extraction plan was set for the secondary safehouse in Racine."
Julianne’s lips curved into a razor-thin smile. "Plans change the moment an explosive goes off ten minutes early, Nicholas. Your mother’s hounds are already converging on the bluffs. Did you really think you could detonate the east wing of Sterling Manor without triggering the city's private grid?"
"Give us the deck, Julianne," my father growled, coughing up dark phlegm. "We're running out of air. If Eleanor's secondary strike team hits the shoreline, this boat is a floating coffin."
May you like
"It's only a coffin if you're on it," my mother said softly. She raised the gun slightly, centering the crosshairs on my father's forehead. "Hand over the Ledger, Arthur. You kept it for twenty-four years. Now it belongs to me."
Above us, the high whine of helicopter rotors cut through the roar of the surf.
