My sister walked into my wedding wearing a white bridal dress

The heavy oak doors of the drawing room clicked shut. Celeste collapsed onto the velvet sofa, burying her face in her hands, her shoulders trembling with quiet sobs.

"He's going to kill us," Celeste whispered in sheer terror. "He doesn't want the money, Lila. He wants to erase us so there's no trace of his past!"

"He isn't killing anyone," Mia said, pacing back and forth like a caged panther. Her eyes burned with a dark, dangerous fire I hadn't seen since the day she walked down the aisle at my wedding. "He made one fatal mistake."

"What mistake?" I asked, kneeling beside Celeste and wrapping an arm around her trembling shoulders.

"He thinks I’m still the insecure, manipulated girl he discarded twenty years ago," Mia said, her voice dropping to a fierce whisper. "He thinks because he set up Victoria, he holds all the strings. But Victoria kept records. When I tore apart her penthouse last month, I didn't just find her forged wills. I found Nicholas’s offshore routing numbers. The ones he used to wire her three million dollars."

"Can you trace them?" I asked, my heart leaping.

"Trace them? Lila, I already have the access keys on an encrypted thumb drive in my handbag," Mia said, pulling out a slim silver device. "If I upload this to the Department of Justice's financial crimes portal, his entire offshore network will be frozen within fifteen minutes. The Swiss authorities will issue an Interpol Red Notice before the sun comes up."

"He has men watching the Wi-Fi router," Celeste pointed out, wiping her tears. "The cellular towers out here are jammed. Look at your phone."

I pulled out my phone. No signal. Zero bars. Nicholas had brought a tactical signal jammer.

"Then we need a physical landline connected to a secure external satellite," I murmured, my thoughts racing. Suddenly, the words of our mother’s letter echoed in my mind: *I did not die on that mountain road... Victoria was only the guardian of a far darker secret.*

"The old greenhouse," I gasped, looking at my sisters. "Do you remember the root cellar beneath the Victorian greenhouse? Mother used to spend hours down there when we were babies."

"The nursery crypt," Mia murmured, realization dawning in her eyes. "There was an old copper-wire telegraph and independent emergency line installed during the Cold War. Victoria never tore it down because she thought it was just rusted piping."

"If we can reach the greenhouse, we can upload the files," I said. "And there's something else. Mother's letter smelled of alpine cedar and lavender. That wasn't just perfume. The only place on this entire estate where alpine cedar grows is right beside the greenhouse pavilion."

"You think she's here?" Celeste breathed, her eyes widening.