Chapter 7 - The Broken Vow at Midnight
Megan’s hand flew to Leo’s collar,
pulling the boy so close against her chest that the toddler let out a muffled squeal.
“No,”
she choked out,
her eyes wide with an old,
unhealed terror.
“Julian made me swear.
On the night he died in that hospital room in Savannah,
he made me swear I would take Noah and run if Raymond ever found us.”
My jaw set like a clamp.
“Noah?”
I asked,
the name slicing through the noise.
“His name is Noah Julian Foster,”
Megan said,
tears finally spilling over her lashes,
running down her pale cheeks.
“Julian changed his last name to Foster after he escaped Atlanta.
He met me when I was working at a diner outside Macon.
He never talked about his past,
not until the cancer ate through his lungs and the doctors gave him three weeks to live.
Then he told me about the Mason family.
He called them vultures who wear bespoke suits.
He said Raymond was the devil who taught him how to set a match.”
A cold,
lethal chill washed down my neck.
“Raymond was there that night,”
I whispered.
“Julian told me Raymond bought the gasoline,”
Megan said,
her voice shaking,
her chin trembling.
“Raymond told Julian that if Arthur died,
Julian and Dominic would inherit the shipping empire together.
Julian was just a boy,
Dominic.
He thought he was saving you from your father’s tyranny.
He didn’t know Raymond had locked the fire doors from the outside,
intending to kill both Arthur and you in one stroke.”
I closed my eyes for a single,
punishing second.
Twenty-two years of self-hatred,
twenty-two years of staring at paralyzed legs,
twenty-two years of believing my own blood had betrayed me,
collapsed into the dust.
My father had not been killed by a rebellious runaway.
He had been executed by his own brother.
And the car accident that crushed my spine two weeks later,
the brake failure on Interstate 20,
had not been an act of God.
It had been Raymond’s cleanup crew.
“Frank,”
I called out,
my voice cutting through the cottage like a steel whip.
The front door swung open.
The old driver stepped into the light,
his oilskin duster glistening with fresh rain,
the twelve-gauge shotgun held casually at his side.
“Mr. Mason?”
“Get the secondary transport van around to the rear service tunnel,”
I commanded.
“Nancy,
take Megan and the boy into the main basement,
behind the wine vault.
The door has an independent biometric lock that operates off my personal thumbprint.”
“I’m not hiding in a basement like a rat,”
Megan fired back,
stepping toward my chair,
her fury instantly overriding her terror.
“If that man wants my child,
he’s going to have to walk through me first.”
I looked up into her hazel eyes,
blazing with an unyielding,
reckless fire.
“He won’t walk through you,
Megan,”
I said,
my words measured,
unshakable,
May you like
and deadly.
“He’s going to have to walk through me.”
