Chapter 3 - Blood on the Snow
The descent down the stone trellis was brutal on my stitched hand. Each grip against the frozen ivy sent sharp, hot fire up my wrist, but the adrenaline surging through my veins drowned the pain. Snow had begun to fall over Lake Michigan, heavy wet flakes that hissed against the dark waters and obscured our tracks.
We reached the seawall unseen. Marcus pulled the heavy chain securing the emergency skiff, the engine muffled with an aftermarket underwater exhaust. Just as my boots hit the fiberglass deck, the sirens on the estate blared to life.
A blinding searchlight slashed through the blizzard, pinning our small craft in a circle of white illumination.
"Claire!"
Ethan's voice cut through the howling wind, amplified by the estate's exterior loudspeakers. I glanced up toward the cliffside patio. He stood at the edge, his dark hair whipped by the gale, coat billowing behind him like wings. He looked less like a husband and more like an apex predator stripped of his patience. Two snipers took position beside him.
"Hold your fire!" Ethan roared into his radio, his gaze locked straight onto mine across the hundred yards of churning water. "Do not shoot that boat!"
"Push off!" I screamed to Marcus.
The small motor hummed to life, pitching us violently into the choppy black waves. The searchlight tracked us as we pulled away from the private harbor, bouncing against the swells. Ethan didn't order his men to shoot, but I watched him sprint toward the boathouse where his high-speed interceptor was docked.
"He's coming after us!" Marcus yelled over the engine's roar.
"He won't make the turn around the breakwater in this swell!" I shouted back, clutching the gunwale. "Head toward the commercial shipping canal! The industrial freighters will block his radar!"
We plunged into the fog, the lights of the Carter estate vanishing into a blur of grey and white. For forty agonizing minutes, we navigated the freezing dark, dodging ice floes and the low hum of distant barges. By the time we tied off at an abandoned steel dock in Gary, Indiana, my lips were blue and my hand was swollen twice its size.
Marcus helped me into a battered Ford sedan hidden inside a rusted warehouse. A heater wheezed lukewarm air against our frozen faces.
"Where do we go?" Marcus asked, checking his rear-view mirror. "Carter has eyes in every precinct from Milwaukee to Indianapolis."
"He owns the roads," I replied, opening my father's manila folder under the dim dome light. "He owns the judges. But he doesn't own his grandfather's private vaults."
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Inside the folder lay an old brass key stamped with a three-digit sequence: 412. It belonged to a safety deposit box at the Old National Bank in downtown Detroit—the only city Ethan Carter had explicitly forbidden his men from entering after the mob wars of 2018.
"Drive to Detroit," I said, leaning my head against the cold glass. "Let him search Chicago until he burns it down."
