Chapter 18 - The Snow and the Fire
Mark stumbled back into the fireplace mantel, the bourbon tumbler flying from his hand and smashing onto the hearth. Blood was already pouring from the cut on his cheek where the ceramic had struck him.
He swung the gun back toward Chloe, but I was already moving.
I cleared the kitchen island in a single stride, swinging the heavy steel pry-bar with the full weight of my body and twenty-two years of buried, suffocated rage.
The bar struck Mark’s right forearm with a dull, sickening crunch.
He screamed—a high, ragged sound of pure agony—and the pistol dropped from his shattered fingers, skittering across the hardwood floor toward the open front door.
"Get the gun!" I screamed at Chloe.
Chloe scrambled across the floor on hands and knees, grabbing the weapon just as Mark lunged forward to tackle her. I stepped between them, driving the heel of my boot hard into Mark’s chest. The force sent him reeling backward, over the low stone hearth, crashing down into the cold ashes of the fireplace where his apology letter had burned months before.
He lay there in the gray soot, clutching his broken arm, gasping for air, looking up at us like a wounded wolf cornered in a trap of its own making.
"Eleanor..." he wheezed, his face covered in soot and blood, his eyes wide with wild, unhinged disbelief. "Please... you can't let them take me. I gave you everything. The houses, the life, the status..."
"You gave me a cage," I said, breathing heavily, the steel bar held ready at my side. "And you charged me twenty-two years of my life for the rent."
Outside, through the open front door, the silence of the valley was suddenly shattered by the distant, wailing scream of sirens. Red and blue emergency lights bounced off the bare winter trees at the bottom of the long driveway, rapidly climbing the snowy ridge.
May you like
Mark’s head snapped toward the door. "You... you actually called them?"
"I didn't have to," I whispered. "The alarm system on this house is silent. The moment the cellar door was breached without the secondary bypass code, the monitoring center dispatched the state troopers."
