Chapter 3 - THE BLUE CAR
Damian didn’t flinch at the sound of the locking door. He simply slipped the silver clasp and the poison packets into his jacket pocket.
Vanessa jolted awake in the armchair, the medical journal spilling to the floor. She gasped, looking frantically from the closed door to Damian.
“Damian? What’s going on? Did the door just lock?”
He stared at her. She looked genuinely terrified. But in Damian’s world, terror was easily manufactured.
He stepped toward the door, ignoring her. He raised his heavy leather boot and kicked the solid wood exactly where the lock mechanism sat. The frame splintered. He kicked it a second time, and the door blasted open, the deadbolt tearing through the doorjamb.
The hallway was empty. The shadows were thick and silent.
Damian turned back to Vanessa. “Pack Ethan’s medical bag. Only the essentials. The monitors, the oxygen.”
“Why? His heart rate—”
“Do it,” Damian snarled.
He scooped his six-year-old son out of the bed, wrapping the boy in a thick quilt. Ethan groaned, his head lolling against Damian’s shoulder.
Vanessa’s hands shook as she packed the bag. “Damian, you can’t move him! He needs his morning smoothie in a few hours, he needs—”
“He’s not drinking anything from this house ever again,” Damian said.
He carried Ethan down the stairs, Vanessa trailing nervously behind him. He marched into his private study. Claire unlocked the door, her face pale. Molly was sitting on the leather sofa, clutching her rag doll.
Damian laid Ethan gently on the sofa next to Molly.
“Claire,” Damian said. “Call Dr. Aris on my private secure line. Tell him to get here in ten minutes. Tell him to bring a toxicology kit.”
Vanessa froze. “Toxicology? Damian, what are you talking about?”
Damian pulled the four folded packets from his pocket and threw them on the mahogany desk.
Vanessa stared at them. She reached out, her fingers hovering over the grey dust. “Is this... heavy metal? Thallium?”
“You tell me,” Damian said, his voice deadly quiet. “Since you’ve been managing his care.”
“I didn't put this here!” Vanessa cried, stepping back, her eyes wide with horror. “Damian, you know me! I love him!”
“Someone loved him enough to put this in his pillow,” Damian said.
Before Vanessa could answer, a small voice broke the tension.
“It wasn't the pretty lady,” Ethan whispered.
Damian rushed to the sofa, kneeling beside his son. “Ethan. Buddy. Who was it?”
Ethan blinked slowly, fighting through the heavy fog of the poison. He looked at Damian with exhausted, sunken eyes.
“The man with the heavy shoes,” Ethan murmured. “He comes in when it’s dark. He told me it was magic fairy dust to help me sleep.”
Damian grabbed Ethan’s small hand. “Which man, Ethan?”
“The one who gave me the blue car,” Ethan said, his eyes sliding shut again. “The loud man.”
Damian stopped breathing.
The vintage blue die-cast car. It sat on Ethan’s dresser. It was a gift for his fourth birthday.
Given to him by Marcus.
Marcus, Damian’s second-in-command. The man who had stood beside him at Rebecca’s funeral. The man who managed the estate’s security.
Claire stepped away from the phone, her hand over the receiver. “Mr. Rourke? Dr. Aris is on his way. But... the phone line just went dead.”
Damian looked at the security monitors on his desk.
One by one, the camera feeds around the perimeter of the estate were blinking out, turning to static.
And then, Damian noticed the silver clasp resting on his desk next to the poison.
If Marcus was poisoning Ethan... why did Marcus have Rebecca’s burial jewelry?
May you like
Before Damian could put the pieces together, the lights in the study flickered and died, plunging them into pitch blackness.
“Don't move,” a voice said from the darkness of the doorway.
