Sirens

Red and blue strobe lights flooded the kitchen, refracting through the millions of glass shards on the floor until the room looked like a pulsing, crystalline heart. The mechanical shriek of the sirens outside finally drowned out the thrum of the SUV’s dying engine. Authority had arrived, but in the sterile, soundproofed cage of the Vance estate, it felt like the arrival of an invading army.

Chloe—Elena—wiped a smear of Visceral crimson from her cheek with the back of her hand. Her nose was crooked, the bone shattered by my kick, but her eyes were still wide, darting toward the back door. She looked at the shadows of the officers moving across the lawn, then at the man in the long coat who still held the small, leather-bound book.

She was calculating the distance between her broken body and the tree line.

"It’s over, Elena," I rasped. I didn't move from the floor, my arms locked around Lily’s carrier, my body acting as a human shield against the woman I had once called sister. "They’re in the foyer. They’re on the patio. You have nowhere left to hide Sarah's body."

Mark didn't even look up. He had collapsed to his knees beside the island, his forehead pressed against the marble. He was sobbing, a rhythmic, pathetic sound that seemed to leak out of him like the oil from the car. The man who had scouted me like a specimen was now just a pile of wet silk and airbag powder.

"Neutralize the witnesses," Chloe whispered, her voice a fragile thread of the clinical mask she had worn for months. She looked at the man in the long coat, her hand reaching into her pocket for the silver injector. "Richard, you said—"

"I said I found the safe, Elena," the man interrupted. His voice was a calm, low-frequency hum that seemed to exist beneath the roar of the sirens. "I didn't say I was coming to help you."

He stepped over a pile of shattered porcelain, his boots crunching with a finality that made Chloe flinch. He reached into his wool coat and pulled out a small, laminated card—the photograph I had seen on the monitor.

"The death certificate was dated 1987," Richard said, his gaze fixed on Chloe’s mangled face. "The photograph was dated 1992. And the woman in it was wearing the necklace."

Chloe let out a low, broken sob, the injector slipping from her fingers and clattering onto the glass. She looked at the man, then at the baby in my lap, her eyes twin pits of murderous realization.

The front door finally yielded to a secondary strike. "Police! Hands in the air!"

Chloe didn't put her hands up. She looked at the sliding door, at the shadows of the officers approaching the spider-webbed glass. She knew Richard wasn't the witness. He was the claimant.

I pressed my forehead against Lily’s carrier, the adrenaline finally beginning to ebb, leaving me with a cold, vibrating terror. I watched Chloe’s silhouette as she turned toward me one last time, her face a contorted mask of hatred.

"I'm not going back to Portland," she hissed.

She lunged, not for me, but for the handgun she’d lost under the industrial refrigerator.

I tried to scream, but my throat was a desert of salt and dust. I saw her fingers graze the cold steel.

But then I saw it. Beyond the glass. Beyond the flashing lights.

A black sedan pulled into the driveway behind the patrol cars. A man stepped out, his face illuminated by a sudden, brilliant flash of blue.

He was the man from the 1985 photograph. Standing next to her father. In a wedding dress.

"Elara," Richard whispered, his hand catching my shoulder as the room began to tilt. "The danger isn't the woman on the floor."