Chapter 17 - The Doppelgänger’s Scream: A Message Carved into the Floorboards
David didn't make it to the front door.
A heavy shattering explosion tore through the rear living room windows. Three flash-bang grenades detonated in rapid succession, flooding the ground floor with blinding magnesium fire and ear-shattering concussive blasts.
David was thrown off his feet, his ears ringing with high-pitched feedback, the room spinning in a dizzying kaleidoscope of smoke and sparks.
Through the white smoke, two figures dressed in black tactical gear breached through the shattered window frames. They moved with military precision, submachine guns raised, sweeping the room.
David rolled onto his stomach, brought the shotgun to his shoulder blind, and fired twice into the smoke.
The heavy buckshot blasted through the first operative’s ceramic chest plate, lifting him off his feet and throwing him backward into the shattered glass. The second operative dove behind the stone fireplace, returning fire with suppressed bursts of 9mm rounds that stitched a deadly line across the cedar ceiling, raining plaster and splinters down upon David’s back.
Upstairs, Leah didn't run to the cellar.
She knew the tactical calculus. If she took Noah out to the skiff in forty-foot waves during a coastal gale, the Atlantic Ocean would do Victoria’s work for her. They would drown in minutes.
Instead, Leah kicked open the narrow attic hatch in the master closet, pushed the laundry basket containing Noah up into the insulation, and hauled herself up into the crawlspace, pulling the wooden trapdoor closed behind her.
Below her, footsteps creaked on the floorboards of the bedroom.
Slow, deliberate, clicking footsteps.
The distinct, rhythmic sound of high-heeled leather pumps accompanied by the metallic tap of an aluminum cane.
*Tap. Click. Tap. Click.*
Leah lay flat against the ceiling joists, peering through a small knot-hole in the attic floorboards.
A woman walked into the bedroom. She wore the white fur coat. She had the silver-gray bobbed hair, styled in Victoria’s signature aristocratic wave. Her profile was unmistakable—the sharp, aquiline nose, the thin, aristocratic lips painted blood-red.
"Leah, darling," the woman purred, her voice dripping with venomous theatricality. "Come out, come out, little mouse. I brought Julian’s silver rattle. Noah needs to know what real family sounds like."
The woman approached the empty bassinet. Seeing it vacant, she let out an irritated, theatrical sigh.
She reached into the pocket of her fur coat and pulled out a heavy six-inch surgical scalpel. Leaning down over the center of the wooden floor, directly beneath the attic knot-hole, she began furiously carving into the pine boards.
Wood shavings flew as steel gouged the timber.
*S-U-R-R-E-N-D-E-R*
Leah’s heart pounded so hard she thought the floorboards would vibrate. But as the woman leaned forward into the sweeping light of the exterior lighthouse beam, Leah’s breath hitched.
The hands.
The hands carving the floor were not the hands of a seventy-two-year-old woman with rheumatoid arthritis. The skin was smooth, youthful, unblemished, free of age spots.
It wasn't Victoria Miller.
It was a decoy—a surgically altered body double sent to draw David’s fire while the real monster orchestrated the harvest.
"She’s not in the bedroom!" the fake Victoria yelled into a throat-mic hidden beneath her fur collar. "The girl took the infant up into the—"
Leah didn't wait for her to finish the sentence.
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Through the knot-hole in the attic floor, Leah leveled the barrel of the .40 caliber pistol straight down at the crown of the silver wig.
She pulled the trigger three times.
