Chapter 158 - The Thanksgiving Chamber
"I don't eat with ghosts," I said, pulling the suppressed pistol from my coat and leveling it directly at Sarah’s forehead.
She didn't flinch. She didn't blink. She looked down the barrel of the 9mm with the bored curiosity of a professor examining an insect beneath a microscope.
"Do you really think a piece of lead changes the ledger, Emily?" she asked quietly. "Look at the floor beneath your feet."
I glanced down without dropping the weapon.
The floor around my chair wasn't oak. It was a section of four-inch wide tongue-and-groove white oak planks, darker than the rest of the room, scarred by deep, circular gouges where furniture legs had scraped violently against the grain. In the center of the wood, beneath three coats of fresh polyurethane, was a dark, irregular mahogany stain.
It was the floor from the Greenwich house.
They hadn't just copied the room. They had cut the floor out of the old estate, hauled it into the mountains, and inlaid it into the foundation of this nightmare.
"Every piece of your trauma has been cataloged, preserved, and converted into an operating system," Sarah continued, walking slowly toward the sideboard where a silver chafing dish sat warming over a blue sterno flame. "Arthur knew that true authority requires an absence of sentiment. He spent forty years looking for a successor who could dismantle the family without hesitation. Richard couldn't do it—Richard was an idiot who drank himself into oblivion on his trust funds. Your cousins were soft, pampered parasites. Only you had the capacity for absolute, merciless efficiency."
"I am not your successor," I spat. "I am the one who liquidated you."
"You liquidated the *cover*," Sarah said, lifting the silver lid of the dish. Inside was not food.
It was an obsidian keycard, identical to the ones we had extracted from the vault in Altaussee, and a heavy brass wax seal bearing the insignia of *The First Table*.
"The family was never an enterprise, Emily. It was an incubation chamber. And the company you stripped? Just grease for the gears. The true capital—the sovereignty—was transferred to the Berkshire coordinate the moment you took your first step out of that Greenwich door."
She looked up at me, her eyes dead and cold.
"There is only one chair at the Table," she said. "Protocol Seven is simple. Unit Zero and Unit Seven cannot both exist on the balance sheet. One is an asset; the other is a redundant liability."
Behind me, the dining room doors slammed shut with the force of an explosive charge.
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Heavy hydraulic deadbolts engaged with three consecutive metallic clangs. The windows were suddenly covered by half-inch steel plates that slid down from inside the cornices, plunging the room into darkness save for the forty flickering candles.
From the hallway outside, the sound of automatic gunfire erupted.
