Chapter 3 - WHISPERS IN THE WALLS
A week passed. The estate operated on a grim routine. The twins were wild, but Clara’s refusal to treat them like fragile porcelain earned her a strange, grudging respect. Toby stopped throwing things; Bella started speaking in full sentences.
But the tension in the house was suffocating. Men in tactical gear rotated shifts every six hours. SUVs with blacked-out windows arrived in the dead of night, unloading men who looked angry and leaving with men who looked bruised.
One afternoon, while the twins were drawing in the conservatory, Arthur Sterling appeared. "Mr. Calveti is pleased," the lawyer said, his tone clinical. "The children have not destroyed anything in seven days. A new record."
"Where is he?" Clara asked, wiping paint off Bella's cheek. "They ask about him."
"Mr. Calveti is... managing a hostile corporate takeover," Sterling said smoothly.
A mob war, Clara translated in her head.
Her instincts flared that evening. She was reading Toby a bedtime story when she heard it—a faint, rhythmic clicking sound outside the second-story nursery window. Clara slowly turned her head. A small black drone was hovering inches from the glass, a red light blinking.
It wasn't Julian's security. His cameras didn't blink.
Panic seized her. "Toby, Bella, under the bed. Now."
"But the story—"
"Now!" Clara hissed, her voice cracking like a whip. The children scrambled underneath the heavy oak frame just as the window shattered inward.
A tear gas canister rolled onto the rug, hissing white smoke.
Clara didn't think. She grabbed a heavy brass lamp, smashed the remaining glass of the window, and hurled the hissing canister back out onto the lawn before the room could fill with toxic gas. She locked the heavy oak door, grabbed the children, and shoved them into the adjoining en-suite bathroom, locking that door too.
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Gunfire erupted downstairs. The war had come to the Calveti estate.
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