Chapter 5 - WHAT THE FIRE LEFT BEHIND
Juliette smiled at me through the smoke.
“You always were too curious.”
I lunged at her.
She fired once, and the bullet hit the wall beside my head.
Before she could shoot again, Lena tackled her. The phone flew from Juliette’s hand and slid beneath a cabinet.
The two women crashed into the doorway.
Marcus groaned behind me.
I wanted to help Lena, but Marcus was bleeding badly. I pressed both hands over the wound in his shoulder.
“Stay with me.”
“I’ve had worse,” he muttered.
“You’re lying.”
“Absolutely.”
The fire alarm triggered the sprinklers. Water poured into the vault.
Juliette kicked Lena in the stomach and ran.
Lena fired, but Juliette disappeared into the smoke.
Federal agents found a maintenance worker tied up near the loading dock. His uniform had been stolen.
Juliette had entered the bank before dawn.
Marcus was taken into surgery. The bullet had missed his heart but torn through an artery.
While I waited at the hospital, Dad woke.
He looked smaller in the hospital bed, stripped of his expensive suit and powerful reputation.
I placed Mom’s letter beside him.
“Did you know?”
He read it slowly.
“No.”
“She told me not to trust anyone with the Mercer name.”
He closed his eyes.
“I deserve that.”
“Why?”
Dad’s silence lasted too long.
“Why?” I repeated.
“The night of the fire, you called me,” he said. “You said Juliette was stealing from the company.”
“I remember.”
“You begged me to come to the lake house.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Juliette told me you were drunk. She said you were having another breakdown.”
I felt cold.
“I never had a breakdown.”
“I know that now.”
“You believed her because it was easier.”
His eyes filled with tears.
“Yes.”
I stood so quickly the chair fell backward.
“For five years, you let her wear Mom’s necklace and spend my money while I was locked in a clinic.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“You thought what she told you to think.”
Dad flinched.
Part of me wanted to hurt him with every word I had swallowed for years.
Another part remembered being seven years old, sitting on his shoulders while he carried me through a summer festival.
Love does not vanish when someone fails you.
Sometimes that makes betrayal worse.
Dad opened the drawer beside his bed and removed a black access card.
“The old textile mill was never abandoned,” he said. “Juliette convinced the board to keep paying the electrical bills.”
“Why?”
“She said the property had environmental hazards.”
“The blue door.”
He nodded.
A nurse entered with Dad’s medication. She wore a surgical mask and kept her eyes down.
Something felt wrong.
Her shoes were men’s work boots.
I grabbed the metal water pitcher just as she pulled a syringe from her pocket.
I struck her wrist.
The syringe fell.
She shoved me against the wall and ran.
Dad pressed the call button while I picked up the syringe.
The label read insulin.
My father was not diabetic.
Security searched the floor, but the fake nurse escaped.
Lena arrived minutes later.
“We traced the stolen uniform,” she said. “It belongs to a private security company.”
“Which one?”
May you like
She turned her phone toward me.
The company’s owner was Nathan Cole—the man Juliette had almost married.
