Chapter 13 - The Traitor in the Shadows
That night, Maple Street felt like a military fortress under siege. Declan had doubled the private security detail, stationing armed guards at every corner of the house. Inside, the air was suffocating. Declan paced the floor of his study, his phone pressed to his ear, furiously barking orders to his legal teams in New York, London, and Zurich.
"They're blocking every injunction!" Declan slammed his phone onto the desk, pacing like a caged beast. "Eleanor has judges in her pocket from Bern to Washington D.C. She's enforcing a custodial sovereign lien against James!"
I sat on the edge of the desk, holding James as he slept softly against my chest. "Declan, we can run. We can take James and disappear somewhere she can't find us."
"You can't run from Eleanor, Clara," Declan said, his voice breaking as he sat down and buried his face in his hands. "She spent thirty years building an untouchable web. She controlled my father until the day he died. She manipulated Julian. She used Vance. She was the monster behind the curtain the entire time."
Suddenly, the security monitors in Declan's study flickered.
I looked at the screens. The camera feed covering the rear security gate showed a shadowed figure moving quietly near the basement access doors. The figure slipped a keycard into the biometric scanner—an access code that only three people possessed.
It was Marcus, Declan’s chief of security.
My heart plummeted into my stomach. "Declan... look at camera four."
Declan snapped his head up. Through the glass window of the study, we watched Marcus step into the dark hallway, holding a encrypted satellite phone to his ear.
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"The target is inside," Marcus whispered into the phone, his voice echoing faintly through the corridor. "Declan is distracted. We execute the extraction at midnight as Lady Eleanor commanded."
Declan stood up, his face devoid of all color, his green eyes flashing with a terrifying, deadly rage. The man he had trusted with his life for a decade had just sold us out to the devil.
