Chapter 29 - The Price of Blood
The shock of the freezing water stole the air from my lungs instantly.
Lake Blackwood was forty degrees of liquid ice, black and merciless. We plunged beneath the foaming surface, tangled in a desperate, life-or-death struggle. Robert’s heavy hands clamped onto my jacket collar, trying to use his superior weight to drag me down into the deep, rocky trench beneath the dock.
Through the murky green gloom, his face looked monstrous—eyes bulging with feral, desperate madness, bubbles streaming from his cracked lips.
I kicked violently, twisting my body, but his grip was like an anchor. My lungs burned for oxygen. The pressure in my chest was immense, black spots encroaching on my vision.
*“Helen didn't raise a victim,”* her voice echoed in my memory, clear as a bell. *“She raised an iron gate.”*
I reached for my belt. Tied to the lanyard was Grandma Helen’s stainless-steel rigging knife—the one she had given me for my sixteenth birthday to cut mooring lines.
I flicked the three-inch blade open.
I drove the steel blade straight into the forearm holding my collar.
Robert released his grip with a silent underwater scream of pain, blood blooming in the water between us like an ink cloud. I kicked hard against his chest, launching myself toward the shimmering light above.
I broke the surface, gasping violently, coughing out mouthfuls of bitter lake water.
I grabbed the wooden ladder attached to the dock piling and hauled myself up onto the drenched platform, collapsing onto hands and knees, shivering uncontrollably from hypothermia and exhaustion.
Behind me, Robert broke the surface, coughing and thrashing.
He was clinging to the stern of the Century boat, his strength rapidly failing as the freezing water and massive blood loss took their toll. The boat’s heavy V8 engine was still idling at high revs, the bronze propeller churning a deadly vortex of white foam inches from his legs.
"Riley!" he gasped, his fingers slipping on the varnished mahogany transom. "Help me up! The current... it's pulling me under the drive!"
I stood up slowly, the rain washing the blood and lake water from my face. I looked down at him.
Ten years of fraudulent tears. Ten years of my mother’s pious tyranny. The attempted murder of Kenneth. The fire consuming my family's legacy behind me.
"Throw me a line, Riley!" Robert begged, his eyes wide with the realization that he was facing the cold, indifferent judgment of the water he had used to fake his death. "I'm your father!"
"My father died ten years ago in Mexico," I said quietly, my voice carrying over the thunder. "You're just a ghost."
A rogue swell lifted the boat. Robert’s numb, bloody fingers slipped from the wet transom.
He let out one final, choked cry before the heavy bronze propeller caught his jacket, dragging him down into the frothing, crimson vortex beneath the boat’s wake.
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The lake surged once, twice, and then swallowed him whole.
Silence returned to the water, broken only by the steady idle of the Century’s engine and the distant wail of state police sirens descending the mountain ridge.
