Chapter 5 - THE CABIN IN THE WOODS
The drive upstate took two hours.
Adrian drove his black SUV in total silence.
Rain lashed against the windshield, blurring the dark trees lining the highway.
I sat in the passenger seat, my fingers tracing the worn beads of my mother’s rosary.
Everything I knew about my life was falling apart.
My mother wasn’t a seamstress. She was a private nurse for the most powerful mafia family in New York.
And she had been at the lake house the night Marcus “died.”
“Why didn’t you know her?” I asked suddenly, breaking the silence.
Adrian kept his eyes on the road.
“My father kept his medical staff highly compartmentalized,” he said, his grip tightening on the steering wheel. “When Marcus came back from college, he was… erratic. Paranoid. My father hired a private team to care for him at the lake house to avoid rumors.”
“And my mother was one of them.”
“Apparently.”
“But the train ticket,” I pressed, looking down at the yellowed slip of paper. “It was for my mother and a child. To Montreal. I was nineteen years old back then, in college in Ohio. I wasn’t a child. Who was she trying to take on that train?”
Adrian’s jaw locked.
“That is exactly what we are going to find out.”
We turned off the main highway onto a gravel road that hadn’t been paved in a decade.
The Blackwood property was massive.
Iron gates loomed out of the darkness. They were heavily chained.
Adrian didn’t stop.
He floored the gas pedal.
The heavy front bumper of the SUV smashed through the rusted iron gates, snapping the chain like a twig.
We bounced over the broken driveway, the headlights sweeping across overgrown grass and dead trees.
Finally, the house came into view.
It was a towering, three-story Victorian mansion overlooking a black, glassy lake.
But it wasn’t abandoned.
A single light burned in a window on the ground floor.
Adrian killed the headlights and parked the SUV behind a thick grove of pine trees.
He reached under his seat and pulled out a heavy black handgun, racking the slide with a terrifying, practiced ease.
“Stay in the car,” he ordered.
“No.”
Adrian looked at me, his eyes flashing. “Hannah, this isn’t a negotiation.”
“It’s my mother’s secret too,” I fired back, my voice steady despite the fear clawing at my throat. “I’m not sitting in the dark while you go in there alone.”
For a second, I thought he was going to lock the doors from the driver’s console.
Instead, he gave a curt nod. “Stay behind me. If I tell you to run, you run to the car and drive away. Do not look back.”
We stepped out into the freezing rain.
The mud sucked at my shoes as we moved toward the house.
Adrian moved with absolute silence, a predator returning to his own territory.
We reached the wraparound porch.
The front door was ajar.
Someone had already used the heavy brass key from Camille’s neck.
Adrian pushed the door open with the barrel of his gun.
Inside, the house smelled of damp wood, dust, and something metallic.
Blood.
Adrian held his hand up, signaling me to stop.
We crept down the main hallway toward the light spilling from the old library.
As we got closer, I heard a sound that made the blood freeze in my veins.
Someone was crying.
Soft, breathless, terrified weeping.
Adrian stepped into the doorway, his gun raised.
I peered around his broad shoulder.
It wasn’t Marcus.
It wasn’t one of Camille’s thugs.
Kneeling on the dusty floorboards, her designer coat covered in mud, was Camille.
She was sobbing, her hands raised in the air.
And standing five feet in front of her, holding a heavy double-barreled hunting rifle leveled directly at her chest, was a little boy.
He couldn’t have been more than ten years old.
He was shivering, his clothes wet from the rain.
But his eyes—dark, fierce, and utterly unyielding—were locked on Camille.
“Drop the gun,” Adrian commanded softly.
The boy flinched but didn’t lower the rifle.
He looked at Adrian.
My heart stopped.
The boy’s face… it was a perfect mirror. The same sharp jawline. The same dark, brooding eyes.
He looked exactly like Adrian.
“Who are you?” Adrian asked, his voice losing some of its hard edge.
The boy’s hands trembled, struggling to hold up the heavy weight of the weapon.
“She tried to burn it,” the boy said, his voice cracking. “She locked my dad in the boathouse and tried to burn it.”
Adrian’s face drained of color.
“Where is your dad?”
“In the boathouse,” the boy cried, a tear finally spilling down his cheek. “She took the key!”
Adrian didn’t hesitate.
He lunged forward, grabbing Camille by the collar of her coat and hauling her to her feet.
“Where is the key, Camille?” he roared, slamming her against the mahogany bookshelf.
“I don’t have it!” she screamed, completely broken. “He took it! He’s crazy, Adrian! Your brother is crazy!”
I didn’t wait to hear the rest.
I looked at the boy.
“Honey,” I said, keeping my voice as soft and steady as I could. “Put the gun down. Let me help you.”
The boy looked at me.
His eyes darted to my neck, where the bruise from Camille’s grip was still visible.
“She hurt you too,” he whispered.
“Yes,” I said softly. “But she can’t hurt us anymore.”
The heavy rifle slipped from his hands, clattering against the floorboards.
I ran forward and pulled him into my arms. He buried his face in my coat, sobbing openly.
“What’s your name?” I asked, stroking his wet hair.
“Leo,” he sobbed.
Adrian dropped Camille like a ragdoll.
He looked at me, then at Leo.
“Watch her,” Adrian said to me, his eyes burning with a desperate panic.
He turned and sprinted out of the house toward the lake.
I held Leo tight, turning my glare to Camille, who was weeping on the floor.
But then, a horrific sound shattered the night.
An explosion.
Massive and deafening.
The windows of the library rattled, and the floorboards shook beneath our feet.
I pulled Leo down, shielding him as orange light flooded the room.
I looked out the window.
Down by the water, the old wooden boathouse was entirely engulfed in a massive fireball.
May you like
Flames shot fifty feet into the night sky.
And Adrian was nowhere to be seen.
