Chapter 6 - Blood in the Nursery
The crimson glow of the backup lights transformed the grand spiral staircase into the gullet of a beast. Every step I took up toward the third floor felt like wading through wet cement, yet my heart battered against my ribs like a trapped bird. In my right hand, the checkered polymer grip of the Sig Sauer was slick with cold sweat.
*Hush little baby, don’t say a word…*
Veronica’s voice still drifted from the monitor speaker in Arthur’s study down below, but up here, in the wide hallway of the sleeping quarters, the sound was direct. Thin. Sharp as the edge of the scalpel she’d clicked open over the airwaves.
"Julian," she called out, not looking up as my shadow broke across the nursery threshold. "You're late. Punctuality used to be your only charming virtue."
She was seated in the white rocking chair beside Lily’s four-poster bed. In the arterial red light of the floor-level LEDs, the white linen sundress she wore looked dipped in burgundy. Her hair was pulled back into the exact low, elegant chignon Elena had favored during our first year of marriage. And in her lap, resting inches from Lily’s curled, trembling fingers, was a stainless steel disposable scalpel, its blade catching the red glare.
Lily was awake. Her wide, hazel eyes—identical to the woman sitting beside her, identical to the woman I had left in the concrete cellar beneath the pool—were locked onto the silver instrument. A single tear tracked down her pale cheek, but she didn’t cry out. The poor girl had been paralyzed by the ghost of her mother before; now she was pinned by the reality of a monster wearing her mother's skin.
"Step away from the bed, Veronica," I said, my voice dead and level. I raised the firearm with both hands, the front tritium sight post leveling directly on the bridge of her nose. "Take your hands off the chair and stand up."
Veronica sighed, a sound of profound maternal disappointment. She tilted her head, her smile stretching until the skin over her cheekbones looked paper-thin. "Do you really think a bullet solves this, Julian? Shoot me, and you blow your precious daughter's eardrums out. Miss by an inch, and the round skips into the drywall behind the headboard." She lifted the scalpel with two delicate fingers, twirling it between her knuckles with the casual grace of a concert pianist. "Besides, you’ve never shot a human being in your life. You’re an acquisitions lawyer. You destroy men with nondisclosure agreements and hostile takeovers. You don’t pull triggers."
"Try me," I whispered. "I know who you are. I know about Arthur’s clinic in Zurich. I know about the trust fund."
Her smile faltered, just for a fraction of a second, before smoothing into something infinitely colder. "Arthur was a sentimental old fool who thought he could buy redemption by leaving everything to his legitimate daughter. But who was here when he choked on his own vomit in that hospice bed, Julian? Elena was already declared dead. I held the basin. I wiped the spit from his chin. I earned this house. I earned this name."
"You locked your own twin sister in an underground crypt!"
"I gave her a home!" Veronica’s voice cracked, the mask slipping to reveal the jagged, venomous creature underneath. "She had the ring. She had the pedigree. She had *you*. And what did I have? Arthur’s hush money and a life spent in boarding schools while Elena played the golden child. When she had her little postpartum breakdown six years ago, it was so easy. A little sodium thiopental in her evening tea, a staged walk toward the edge of the Pacific cliff, and suddenly Veronica Cole was dead, and Elena was simply... resting."
"Daddy," Lily whimpered, her voice small, cracked.
"Don't look at him, Lily bug," Veronica murmured, her hand drifting toward the girl's face. The steel blade hovered half an inch from Lily’s cheek. "Daddy didn't notice I was gone for two years. He kissed my mouth every morning thinking I was her. He didn't know the difference between the saint and the sinner."
The floorboards behind me creaked.
A floorboard on the third-floor landing never creaked unless someone stepped on the unsupported joist near the linen closet.
Veronica’s eyes flicked past my shoulder. In that microscopic fraction of a second—when her attention severed from the scalpel—I lunged.
I didn't fire. I slammed my left shoulder into her chest, knocking the rocking chair backward onto the hardwood floor. The scalpel flew from her grip, clattering against the toy chest. Veronica shrieked, her manicured nails raking across my throat, drawing hot lines of fire across my skin. She fought with the rabid, feral intensity of someone who had lived in the dirt and would kill rather than return to it.
I pinned her wrist, pressing my forearm against her throat, the Sig pressed beneath her jaw. "It's over."
"Julian! Look out!"
The voice didn't come from the woman beneath me. It came from the doorway.
I glanced back. Elena stood there, leaning heavily against the doorframe. She was filthy, wrapped in an old utility blanket from the maintenance shed, her bare feet leaving wet smudges of red-tinted pool water on the oak floor. In her trembling hands, she held a heavy brass fire poker from the downstairs hearth.
The two women stared at each other across the crimson-lit room. Two identical faces. One flushed with murderous adrenaline, the other hollowed by two years of starvation and darkness.
"Veronica," Elena rasped, her voice trembling with an agonizing mixture of terror and grief.
"Look at you," Veronica hissed from beneath my arm, spitting blood onto my collar. "The corpse crawls out of the garden."
Using my momentary distraction, Veronica drove her knee savagely between my legs. The agony was blinding. My grip slipped, the breath rushing out of me in an involuntary gasp. She threw me off with shocking strength, scrambling across the floor toward the French doors that opened out onto the second-story nursery balcony.
"Julian!" Elena cried, stumbling forward.
I rolled over, fighting through the nausea, raising the gun. "Veronica! Freeze!"
She didn't stop. She hit the latch of the glass doors, bursting out into the howling coastal wind. The storm had finally broken against the cliffs. Heavy, cold drops of rain swept into the bedroom, rattling the sheer curtains.
By the time I reached the balcony railing, the rain blinding my eyes, Veronica was already gone. Below, the trellis woven with wisteria vines swung violently in the gale. On the stone terrace sixty feet below, a shadow darted toward the dark expanse of the cliffside gardens.
Behind me, in the warm, blood-red room, Elena dropped to her knees beside the bed, wrapping her trembling, bruised arms around our sobbing daughter.
"Lily," Elena wept, burying her face in the child’s curls. "My baby. My sweet, sweet baby."
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I lowered the gun, my hands shaking uncontrollably, listening to the thunder rattle the glass. We were not safe. The house was locked down from the inside, the power was severed, and Veronica was loose in the dark.
***
