Chapter 6 - The Bloodline Ledger
The name of my own brother tasted like copper and bile in my mouth.
I lunged forward, my fingers missing his collar by a fraction of an inch as Nicholas sidestepped with an unnatural, fluid grace. He didn't run. He simply backed toward the open balcony doors, the cold autumn wind blowing his hair across a forehead that bore the exact same facial structure as mine—yet hid a mind completely warped by greed.
"Where is it, Nick?" I asked, my voice dropping into a lethal, quiet register that made the ambient hum of the laptop fan sound deafening. "Where did you leave the proof?"
Nicholas chuckled, a low, throbbing sound that crawled along my spine. "You think I'm going to hand it to you, Dominic? I placed it right where little Lucia goes to hide when she's scared. In the old mahogany toy chest in the nursery. She found it yesterday while looking for her wooden rabbit. That's why she spoke today. That's why she looked at you and saw the monster she was told you were."
My chest seized. The nursery. The girls' room was fifty feet down the corridor, right where Rosa was trying to soothe my terrified daughters.
"If you laid a finger on my children—" I started, stepping forward.
"I didn't have to touch them," Nicholas interrupted, his smile turning sharp and brittle as he reached behind his back. "I let your own shadow do the work. And as for the proof... well, you're a little too late to stop what's coming."
Before I could cross the room, Nicholas pulled a heavy silver detonator from his coat pocket and flicked the toggle switch upward.
A red LED light blinked furiously on the wall panel beside him.
May you like
"What did you do?" I roared, closing the distance between us in a single bound.
"Checking out early," Nicholas sneered, and before my hands could wrap around his throat, he threw himself backward off the second-story balcony into the darkness of the courtyard below.
