Chapter 3 - The Vault of Sins
We barricaded ourselves inside the private bridal suite, wedging a heavy mahogany sideboard against the double doors. Outside, the muffled chaos of shouting security guards and Beatrice’s distant wailing echoed through the estate’s cavernous corridors. Chloe sat on the edge of the velvet settee, shaking uncontrollably as I pressed a damp linen towel against her bleeding temple.
"Sweetheart, talk to me," I pleaded, my heart hammering against my ribs like a caged bird. "What did Beatrice mean? What was Mother talking about?"
Chloe looked up, her tear-filled hazel eyes brimming with a terrible, mature sadness that shattered my heart. She reached beneath the torn layers of her silk skirt and withdrew a small, tarnished brass key suspended from a braided leather cord around her thigh.
"Ethan and I didn't just come here to get married, Mom," Chloe confessed, her voice barely louder than a whisper. "Three nights ago, we received an anonymous courier delivery addressed to Julian’s rightful heir. It contained a safe-deposit logbook from the First Continental Bank."
My breath caught in my throat at the mention of Julian—my late husband, who had supposedly perished in an accidental brake failure along the coastal highway when Chloe was barely two years old. For twenty-two years, I had mourned him as an unfortunate victim of a tragic mechanical malfunction, relying on my mother’s cold charity to keep a roof over our heads.
"Julian didn't lose control of his car, Eleanor," Ethan broke in, stepping away from the drawn window curtains. His face was pale, his wedding jacket discarded to reveal sweat-drenched linen. "His brake lines were deliberately severed inside the family estate garage. He had discovered that Evelyn and Beatrice had systematically siphoned over forty million dollars from his private trust to cover Beatrice’s catastrophic offshore gambling debts."
Chloe squeezed my hand, her voice cracking under the weight of the nightmare. "Julian changed his will hours before he died, placing the entire residual estate into a locked trust that would automatically activate and transfer to me on my twenty-fourth birthday—today—at precisely five in the afternoon. If I died unwed or incapacitated before five, the entire estate defaulted irrevocably to Grandma Evelyn."
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The room seemed to tilt beneath my feet as the horrifying truth locked into place: my family hadn't suffered a sudden breakdown of sanity. They were orchestrating an assassination.
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