Chapter 27 - THE UNDER-SKIN
Nicholas did not lower the weapon. He kept his left hand out, motioning for Lucy to crawl toward him.
"Lucy. Come here."
The child hesitated, looking between the woman in black and the man with the dark steel. Then, with the unhurried slowness of a three-year-old weighed down by sleep and half-eaten sugar, she scrambled on hands and knees across the pale wool. Nicholas caught her under the arm with his left hand, hoisting her against his ribcage without taking his eyes off his mother’s throat.
Lucy’s head sank into the crook of his shoulder. Her wrist dangled over his forearm.
Under the harsh halogen lights of the corridor behind him, the purple discoloration wasn't just bruising. Now that Nicholas was three inches away, he saw what the dim lamplight of Chapter 1 had obscured: the four marks were perfectly spaced, perfectly parallel, and at the center of the lowest indentation, the skin had not bruised—it had stretched over a minute, hard ridge no longer than a grain of long rice.
"What is that?" Nicholas demanded.
"A tracker?" Isabella asked, her eyebrow arching with aristocratic disdain. "Do you think Daniel Santos was an engineer? Daniel was an accountant who stole from the wrong blind trust. That isn't hardware, Nicholas. That is a suture line."
Arthur groaned again, his hand finding the edge of the overturned side table. Nicholas didn't turn, but his peripheral vision tracked the old butler's struggle to sit upright. Blood was matting Arthur’s silver hair behind his right ear, thick and dark.
"Arthur," Nicholas barked. "Report."
"She... she didn't hit me, Mr. Nicholas," Arthur rasped, his voice scraping like gravel through a sieve. He spat a mouthful of red onto the floorboards. "It was... the runner from the gatehouse. The boy who brought the morning bread. He wasn't the regular boy."
"Petey?" Nicholas’s eyes narrowed.
"Petey's in the dry-well behind the stables," Isabella supplied mildly. "He has been there since four this morning. The boy who came up the back stairs had a suppressed .22 and a clean pair of surgical tweezers. He wasn't here to kidnap the girl, Nicholas. He was here to take the suture out before you realized Daniel had hidden the Caruso treasury key inside his own daughter's radial artery."
Nicholas felt the room tilt. The weight of the child in his arm suddenly seemed impossible, like carrying an unexploded shell through a crowded ballroom.
"Daniel wouldn't," Nicholas said, though the logic was already clicking into place with sickening precision. "He was terrified of me. He wouldn't cut his own daughter."
"He didn't," Isabella said. She walked slowly toward the terrace doors, her reflection shimmering against the dark glass like an apparition that couldn't quite decide whether to exist. "His wife did. Teresa wasn't an accountant's wife, Nicky. Before Daniel bought her that little stone house in Scarsdale, her name was Teresa Vane. And she worked twelve years in the basement archives of the Bank of Nova Scotia, logging every untraceable gold bond your father ever smuggled out of Palermo."
Nicholas stared at the silver-haired woman. "Teresa died six months ago. Cancer."
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"Teresa died three days ago," Isabella said, turning back to him, her eyes burning like phosphorus. "In the guest cottage at your own estate in Lake George. And your father was the one who signed the death certificate."
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