Chapter 29 - The Chapel of Secrets
The climb up the hundred-and-fifty stone steps of the cliffside stairway was nothing short of an ascent through the circles of hell. The blizzard raged with blinding ferocity, turning every breath into a struggle against freezing air, while Sarah carried not only her own weight but my entire frame and the heavy steel wheelchair through knee-deep drifts of wet snow.
By the time we finally crested the summit and dragged ourselves onto the stone plateau behind the Vance estate chapel, Sarah’s face was bruised from the biting wind, her breathing ragged and shallow. But she didn't drop me. She set the wheelchair down gently on the frozen flagstones of the courtyard, her hand instantly dropping back to her sidearm.
The chapel looked like a relic from a forgotten century—its gothic stone arches dusted with thick layers of snow, its stained-glass windows dark and lifeless against the gray winter sky. But as we approached the heavy oak side doors, I noticed something strange: the iron latch wasn't frozen shut. It had been recently oiled.
"Someone’s inside," Sarah whispered, pressing her back against the rough stone wall beside the entrance, signaling for me to stay put while she slowly pushed the heavy door inward with the barrel of her pistol raised.
The door creaked open with a long, mournful groan, revealing the cavernous interior of the old chapel. Rows of empty wooden pews stretched toward a marble altar lit not by candles, but by the harsh, flickering glow of a dozen high-tech computer monitors set up right over the holy dais.
And sitting in the center of the altar, tethered to an IV drip and a portable biometric monitor that beeped with a steady, rhythmic pulse, was a figure so gaunt and pale I almost didn't recognize her.
"Helen?" I breathed out, the word escaping my lips like a broken prayer as my wheelchair rolled forward down the center aisle, the rubber tires squeaking against the polished stone floor.
The woman on the altar slowly turned her head. Her hair was stark white, her skin translucent, but those deep, intelligent eyes—the exact same eyes I saw in the mirror every morning—stared back at me with a spark of fierce, unmistakable life.
"Mother...?" Helen’s voice was a dry, rasping whisper, as if she hadn't spoken aloud in years. "You... you actually came."
Before I could reach the altar, a heavy metallic click echoed from the shadows behind the choir loft.
"I told you she wouldn't stay in the lake, sister," a cool, mocking voice drifted down from the upper balcony.
We all looked up. Victoria stepped out from behind the towering organ pipes, her charcoal coat swaying slightly, but she wasn't alone. Standing beside her, holding a remote detonator connected to a ring of industrial explosives strapped around the base of the chapel's stone pillars, was a man I thought I would never see again in this lifetime—my eldest son, Richard, who had supposedly died in a plane crash over the Atlantic a decade ago.
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Richard smiled down at us, his face scarred and hardened by years of living in the shadows, holding the fate of the entire family in the palm of his hand.
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