Chapter 6 - The Cottage Floor
The rain lashed sideways against the glass windows of the staff cottage behind the main mansion, sounding like handfuls of gravel hurled against wood. The wind screamed through the oak trees, tearing branches away and plunging the path into pitch-black darkness.
Ethan didn't wait for an umbrella. He tore across the wet stone courtyard, his expensive leather shoes soaking through in seconds, his tailored suit clinging to his broad shoulders.
He reached the front door of the cottage suite. It was unlocked, swinging slightly ajar in the howling wind.
"Clara!" Ethan shouted, throwing the door open.
The warm, cozy interior he vaguely remembered from maintenance walkthroughs was gone. In its place was a scene of violent, chaotic destruction.
A ceramic vase lay shattered across the kitchenette floor, its blue and white pieces scattered among spilled coffee grounds and broken glass. A framed photograph of Clara and Lily smiling in a park in Dayton lay face down, cracked right down the middle.
And there, lying motionless beside the small kitchen island, was Clara.
"Clara!" Ethan yelled, dropping to his knees beside her.
He slid his hands under her shoulders, pulling her upper body away from the hard tile. A dark, crimson stain had soaked through the blonde strands of her hair and pooled onto the linoleum. Her skin was ice cold, her breathing shallow and ragged, and a nasty, jagged laceration bled freely from the side of her temple.
"Clara, can you hear me?" Ethan pressed two fingers against her neck. Her pulse was thready, weak, and dangerously slow.
"Mr. Ethan!"
Lily skidded through the doorway behind him, stopping dead in her tracks when she saw her mother on the floor. A muffled sob broke from the little girl's throat, and she dropped to her knees, burying her face against Clara’s shoulder. "Mommy... wake up, Mommy. Please wake up."
Ethan’s mind raced with the terrifying precision of a crisis management algorithm, but for the first time in his life, the system was failing him because human life—real, fragile, innocent human life—was bleeding out in his hands.
He pulled his cell phone from his wet trouser pocket with shaking fingers, tapped the speed dial for his private security chief, and screamed into the receiver.
"Tony! Bring the medical kit and the emergency vehicle around to the back cottage right now. Call an ambulance to the North Gate. If they take more than four minutes, I’ll strip this entire estate down to the dirt."
He cut the line, tossing the phone aside. He ripped his silk tie from his collar, folded it into a thick pad, and pressed it firmly against Clara’s bleeding head wound to stem the flow.
"Stay with me, Clara," Ethan commanded, his voice cracking with an emotion he hadn't felt since he was a boy losing his own parents. "You hear me? You survived Dayton. You survived the world. You aren't dying on my floor."
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As he held pressure against the wound, his eyes caught a flash of light reflecting off the kitchen counter. Resting right beside a spilled box of children's cereal was a heavy diamond-encrusted bracelet—the exact tennis bracelet Madison Vale had been wearing at the dinner table three hours ago.
Madison hadn't just threatened Clara. She had left her calling card in blood.
