Chapter 5 - SHADOWS IN THE DARK
The next forty-eight hours were a blur of lawyers, emergency board meetings, and lockdown protocols. The mansion was heavily guarded, but Grace couldn't shake the terrible feeling of being watched.
Her fears were confirmed on a rainy Tuesday evening. Noah was in the media room watching a movie, and Grace was in the kitchen brewing coffee for Nathaniel’s legal team. She walked past the tall windows overlooking the rear gardens when a flash of lightning illuminated a figure standing by the tree line.
It was a man in a dark raincoat. He was holding something metallic.
Grace gasped and dropped her mug, the porcelain shattering against the tile. Before she could scream, the lights in the entire mansion abruptly shut off. The hum of the refrigerator died. The heavy silence of a power outage descended upon the estate.
"Noah!" Grace screamed, plunging into the darkness.
She ran blindly through the corridors, her heart hammering against her ribs. She burst into the media room, finding Noah huddled on the sofa, clutching a flashlight he had found in a side table.
"Mom, what's happening?" he asked, terrified.
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"We have to hide, sweetheart," Grace whispered, grabbing his hand. She knew this house better than anyone. She pulled him toward the servant's corridors—a labyrinth of narrow hallways completely disconnected from the main rooms.
Meanwhile, in his study, Nathaniel pulled a licensed firearm from his safe. He knew the backup generators should have kicked in immediately. This wasn't an outage; it was sabotage. And he knew exactly who had orchestrated it.
