Chapter 7 - Behind the Veil
They crashed through the glass doors in an explosion of green and crystal.
The estate's grand conservatory was a soaring, Victorian glass palace filled with exotic tropical flora, winding stone pathways, and marble fountains.
Now, it was a battleground lit by the pale moonlight filtering through the shattered skylights above.
Arthur and Kaelen tumbled down the stone steps, crashing into a thick bed of crushed ferns and wet loam.
Arthur rolled away, panting heavily, his white shirt soaked in his own blood and hers.
Kaelen pushed herself up from the earth, wiping the crimson torrent from her pulverized nose with the back of her tactical glove.
Her face was no longer that of a sophisticated thief.
It was the face of a cornered feral animal.
"You broke my nose, you little bastard," she snarled, her voice thick and wet with blood.
She reached behind her boot, drawing an eight-inch combat knife with a non-reflective black blade.
The steel gleamed in the moonlight.
Arthur scrambled backward on his hands and knees, his back hitting the stone lip of the central fountain.
He had no weapon.
His knuckles were bruised, his shoulder was bleeding profusely, and his energy was fading fast.
"You know what the worst part about you was, Arthur?" Kaelen whispered, stalking toward him with the knife held low, in a professional reverse grip. "The sheer, pathetic boredom."
She took another step, her boots sinking softly into the damp earth.
"Listening to you whine about your legacy. Listening to you complain about the burden of the Hawthorne fortune. You had everything, and you still cried like a child."
"My father built this family with honor," Arthur choked out, forcing himself to stand, using the fountain's edge for support.
"Your father was a thief in a three-thousand-dollar suit!" Kaelen snapped, her cold eyes flashing with genuine malice. "Where do you think the Hawthorne Star came from? You think your great-grandfather bought it at an auction?"
Arthur blinked, the words cutting through the adrenaline.
"What are you talking about?"
"It was stolen from an imperial vault in Vienna in 1919," Kaelen said, circling him slowly. "Your family built their shipping empire on laundered gold and stolen antiquities. You sit on a throne of blood, Arthur, and you pretend to be saints."
"And what are you?" Arthur shouted back. "A hero?"
"I’m the collection agency," Kaelen hissed.
She lunged.
The blade moved in a vicious, horizontal arc meant to open Arthur’s throat from ear to ear.
Arthur ducked beneath the strike by a fraction of an inch, the wind of the blade chilling his skin.
He lunged inside her reach, wrapping both arms around her knife wrist, wrestling with every scrap of his remaining strength.
They crashed against the stone rim of the fountain, water splashing violently around their knees.
Kaelen was stronger, her combat conditioning far superior to Arthur’s desperate, untrained struggle.
She slowly, inexorably forced the black blade downward toward his chest.
The tip of the knife pierced Arthur’s tuxedo shirt, the cold steel biting into the skin over his sternum.
Arthur gritted his teeth, his arms shaking violently as he tried to hold the blade back.
"Die like your father," she whispered into his face, her blood dripping from her chin onto his cheek.
Suddenly, a sharp, clean crack echoed through the glass dome of the conservatory.
A high-caliber rifle round shattered the upper glass, descending with pinpoint accuracy.
The heavy bullet struck Kaelen’s right shoulder, tearing through bone and muscle with explosive hydraulic force.
Kaelen shrieked in agony as her arm went entirely limp, the combat knife slipping from her fingers and splashing into the fountain pool.
She was hurled sideways, crashing into the stone tiles.
Arthur stumbled back, collapsing into the shallow fountain water, gasping for breath.
He looked up toward the conservatory's second-story iron catwalk.
Standing there, framed against the moonlight through the broken dome, was Agent Thorne.
Beside her, holding an ancient lever-action Winchester rifle with smoke curling from its barrel, was eighty-year-old Eleanor Hawthorne.
The matriarch stood on her own two feet, leaning against the iron railing, her silver hair wild and her face set in stone.
"In this family," Eleanor’s raspy voice echoed through the vast glass chamber, "we do not leave our debts unpaid."
Kaelen lay on the stone tiles, gasping in shock, her right arm completely useless.
She looked at the old woman on the catwalk, then looked down at the fifty-carat sapphire that had spilled from her tactical belt, rolling to a stop near Arthur’s feet.
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She tried to reach for it with her left hand, but Arthur’s heavy, dress shoe came down squarely upon her wrist, pinning it to the marble.
***
