I caught my husband kissing my older sister in my mother’s kitchen while twenty people celebrated my father’s sixty-fifth birthday in the next room. / Chapter 63 / 120

Chapter 63 - Blood on the Silk

The freezing salt water felt like thousands of needles stabbing my skin as we plunged into the churning current. Liam held my hand with a grip of forged steel, hauling us beneath the frothing surf along the submerged guide-line he had pre-staged weeks ago.

Above the surface, muted pops echoed through the water as heavy-caliber rounds pierced the waves, trailing trails of luminous bubbles that missed our heels by inches. We kicked desperately, dragging ourselves through a submerged archway where the water abruptly dropped into an air pocket—a hollowed-out subterranean smugglers' tunnel winding beneath the cliffs of Ravenscar.

We breached the surface, coughing up saltwater onto the smooth shale floor.

"Move," Liam wheezed, clutching his wounded shoulder as he hauled me up the incline. "The tide will fill this cavern in forty minutes."

We scrambled up the dark stone corridor until we reached an old iron hatch. Liam pushed it open, revealing the abandoned wine cellar of a dilapidated estate three miles downcoast from the lighthouse—an auxiliary safehouse untouched by Victoria’s advance scouts.

I collapsed against a stack of rotting cedar crates, shivering violently, water pooling at my feet. Liam stripped off his soaked tactical vest, exposing a jagged bullet furrow along his collarbone. I immediately reached for the emergency medical kit mounted on the wall, my hands trembling as I cracked an antiseptic vial and pressed gauze to his flesh.

"Hold still," I whispered, tears of adrenaline and rage stinging my eyes.

Liam looked into my eyes, his face pale under the flickering utility light, yet his expression was softer than I’d ever seen it. "You’re tougher than anyone they’ve ever trained, Maya. Victoria thinks she broke you that night in the kitchen. She has no idea what she created."

Before I could answer, an old radio unit on the workbench crackled to life, picking up an unencrypted analog distress frequency.

*“Maya... please... if you're on this frequency... Maya!”*

The voice was ragged, choked with sobs, breathless and desperate.

It was Eleanor.

I froze, the gauze halfway to Liam’s wound. Liam held up a fist, signaling caution, but leaned closer to the transceiver.

I keyed the mic with a shaking thumb. "Eleanor?"

*“Maya! Oh God, Maya!”* Eleanor cried, the sound of tearing fabric and distant alarms echoing in the background. *“She’s bringing Julian to the Grand Metropole. She’s executing the final liquidation tonight at midnight! She used me, Maya. I swear on our father’s grave, I never wanted Julian! Mother told me that if I didn’t kiss him, if I didn’t let you catch us, she would release the falsified fraud documents that would put Father in federal prison for the rest of his life!”*

My throat tightened so hard I could barely swallow. "You destroyed my life to protect Father?"

*“Father was already dead, Maya!”* Eleanor shrieked into the mic, breaking down into hysterical sobs. *“Mother poisoned him three months before the party! The man who sat at that dining table... the man celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday... that wasn't Father! It was an actor from the syndicate’s shadow theater! Father died in an unmarked clinic in Geneva!”*