Chapter 5 - The Trap at the Estate
The recording clicked off, leaving behind a silence so absolute you could hear the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead.
My grandfather didn't look surprised. In fact, a dark, dangerous glint appeared in his old eyes—the look of a man who had been waiting decades for an enemy to step out into the open.
"They think I'm losing my mind," Walter muttered, a faint, humorless smile touching the corners of his mouth. "They think because I live quietly in the old house, I don't know what's crawling around in the shadows."
He looked up at Marcus Vance. "You said they're meeting at the downtown hotel?"
"Room 412," Marcus confirmed. "Arthur thinks he has the upper hand because he managed to forge a preliminary asset-transfer draft using your signature from an old power of attorney."
Walter slowly stood up from his chair, using his cane to steady himself. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a heavy, old-fashioned brass key attached to a leather fob—the key to the main safe at our family estate.
"Lauren," Grandpa Walter said, looking down at me with fierce, unwavering intensity. "Your husband is trapped in a storm, your baby is safe in this room under guard, and your mother has chosen a thief over her own flesh and blood."
He tossed the brass key onto my hospital blanket.
"It's time to end this. Marcus has a car waiting downstairs. Do you want to come with us and collect what your family is owed, or do you want to stay here and wait for them to finish robbing you blind?"
Before I could answer, my phone on the bedside table lit up once more, flashing an incoming call from an unrecognized, restricted number.
I picked it up, my hands steadying with a sudden, adrenaline-fueled clarity, and pressed accept.
"Hello?" I said.
A familiar, frantic voice burst through the speaker—not my mother's, and not my husband's.
May you like
It was Arthur.
“Lauren, darling,” the smooth, venomous voice purred through the line. “I hear you’ve had a little accident. It would be a terrible shame if anything else happened to your newborn son while you’re stuck in that hospital bed, wouldn't it?”
