Chapter 6 - Bloodlines and Betrayals
The old apartment was an absolute ruin.
The front door had been forced off its hinges with a crowbar. Inside, my drawings were shredded, my grandmother’s antique porcelain smashed across the hardwood, and the floorboards in the master bedroom pried up with violent haste.
On the living room wall, written in red spray paint over my grandmother’s favorite painting, was a single, frantic sentence:
*SIGN OVER THE TRUST OR CHLOE SUFFERS THE CONSEQUENCES.*
I stared at the wall, nausea churning in my stomach. “Chloe? Why would he threaten Chloe? She’s on his side!”
“She’s not on his side anymore,” a weak, broken voice came from the hallway.
Lorenzo’s hand instantly went to the concealed holster beneath his arm, his body shifting to put me completely behind him. Marco raised his weapon, sweeping the shadowed corridor.
“Hold your fire!” a woman’s frantic scream echoed out.
Meredith Hayes stumbled into the apartment, looking like an apparition of her former self. Her hair was unwashed, her designer clothes rumpled and stained with mascara, her face gaunt and hollow. Behind her, trembling and bruised, was Chloe.
Chloe looked terrified. Her left cheek was swollen with a dark, purplish bruise, her lower lip split, her designer jacket torn at the shoulder. She wasn't wearing my grandmother’s engagement ring anymore.
“Chloe!” I cried out, stepping around Lorenzo despite his hand gripping my wrist to keep me back. “What happened to you?”
Chloe collapsed to her knees in the middle of the ruined living room, sobbing so violently her entire body convulsed.
“He... he went crazy, Scarlet,” she wept, covering her face with bloody hands. “When Lorenzo called his debt, Ethan’s investors came to our hotel suite. They told him if he didn't deliver the deeds to the docks by tomorrow morning, they were going to kill him... and then they hit me to show him they meant it.”
My mother dropped to her knees beside Chloe, looking up at me with wild, desperate eyes. For the first time in my life, Meredith Hayes wasn't looking at me with cold condescension. She was looking at me with sheer, pathetic terror.
“Scarlet, you have to help us,” Meredith pleaded, her hands clawing at the hem of my coat. “Ethan has gone completely mad. He took my bank cards, he drained Chloe’s trust fund, and he said if we don't convince you to sign the release for Evelyn’s land, he’ll tell the cartel we were the ones who set them up!”
Lorenzo walked forward, his polished shoes crunching over the shards of broken porcelain. He looked down at my mother with absolute, unadulterated disgust.
“You brought this venom into your house, Mrs. Hayes,” Lorenzo said, his voice cold as a winter grave. “You helped him forge conservatorship papers to lock your eldest daughter in a cage. You celebrated when he put a stolen ring on your younger daughter’s finger. And now that the hound you fed has turned to bite your throat, you come crawling to the daughter you tried to destroy?”
Meredith flinched, curling into herself, unable to meet Lorenzo’s gaze. “I didn't know... I thought Ethan was saving the family! He told me Scarlet was losing her mind!”
“You knew,” I said. The words came out quiet, cold, and dead.
I looked down at the mother who had spent my entire childhood telling me I wasn't pretty enough, wasn't charming enough, wasn't compliant enough. I looked at the sister who had happily climbed into bed with the man I loved just to prove she could take him from me.
“You knew exactly what you were doing,” I continued, my voice steady, cutting through the silence like a razor. “You didn't care if I ended up in an asylum, Mother, as long as your country club membership was paid. You didn't care about Chloe’s heart, either. You just wanted the money.”
Chloe looked up at me, fresh tears carving clean lines through the dirt and dried blood on her cheeks. “Scarlet... I’m sorry. I swear to God, I’m so sorry. Ethan told me you were going to leave him anyway. He told me you didn't love him... he lied to me! Please... don't let them kill me!”
I closed my eyes for a single second, taking a deep, shuddering breath. The pain was there, but beneath it was an unshakeable, diamond-hard resolve.
I opened my eyes and looked at Lorenzo.
“Where is the physical ledger, Scarlet?” Lorenzo asked, his tone shifting into tactical precision. “If Ethan doesn't have it, where did Evelyn hide it?”
A sudden, sharp memory flashed in my mind.
*“Scarlet, my sweet girl,”* Evelyn had whispered to me three days before she died, handing me a small brass key shaped like a blooming rose. *“A true lady never keeps her treasures where the thieves look. She keeps them where the roses grow.”*
My breath hitched. “The rose garden. Evelyn’s estate in upstate Hudson. Beneath the stone fountain where Ethan promised to marry me.”
Lorenzo’s eyes flared. “Marco! Secure the perimeter. Get Mrs. Hayes and Chloe into a safehouse in Queens under twenty-four-hour armed guard. Nobody leaves. Nobody uses a phone.”
“What about Ethan?” I asked, my heart pounding violently against my ribs.
Lorenzo pulled his weapon from beneath his jacket, checking the slide with a clean, lethal click.
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“Ethan knows about that fountain,” Lorenzo said grimly. “He was there when your grandmother died. He’s already on his way to Hudson.”
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