Chapter 6 - The Strike That Shook the House
Celeste swung her free hand with all the vicious, frantic force in her body.
Her diamond rings glittered in the dim overhead bulb, aimed directly to tear the flesh from Laura’s cheek.
Laura did not flinch.
She did not lean back.
She did not duck.
With the fluid, merciless efficiency of someone trained to neutralize armed assailants in close quarters, Laura twisted Celeste’s captured wrist downward, breaking her balance in a single heartbeat.
Then, bringing her own right hand up from the hip, Laura drove a closed, compact, thunderous punch straight into the center of Celeste Vane’s jaw.
The crack of bone and cartilage echoed through the scullery like a gunshot.
It was not a slap.
It was not a frantic, clawing strike born of panic.
It was a clean, professional, devastating blow designed to put an enemy flat on their back.
Celeste’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling as her legs completely folded beneath her.
She crashed heavily onto the wet stone floor, her emerald gown soaking in dirty dishwater, her hair splaying across the flags.
Her cheek hit the marble with a dull, wet thud.
The silence that followed was absolute.
It was a silence so heavy that the slow drip of the brass water tap sounded like a sledgehammer falling on iron.
Rosa stopped sobbing.
Percy’s breath caught in his throat.
Bess looked as though her heart had stopped beating entirely.
In the history of the Hardwick dynasty, no domestic worker had ever raised a voice, let alone a fist, against the ruling family.
Celeste lay on the floor, groaning faintly, her mouth bleeding, her pristine aristocratic composure shattered into bloody ruins.
Then, from the dark archway connecting the scullery to the grand wine cellar, a voice broke the stillness.
“That was remarkably good form,” Garrett Hardwick said.
He was standing in the shadows of the doorway, his charcoal coat unbuttoned, his hands resting casually inside his trouser pockets.
He had been standing there the entire time.
He had seen the pearls drop.
He had heard the accusations.
He had watched Laura step forward, and he had witnessed the punch that had dropped his fiancée like a sack of grain.
Celeste coughed, spitting a mixture of blood and spit onto the flags, her trembling hands pushing her upper body off the floor.
She looked toward the doorway, her eyes wild, desperate, and filled with venomous triumph.
“Garrett!” Celeste choked out, her voice cracked and trembling.
“Kill her!”
“Kill her right now!”
“She struck me—she assaulted your fiancée in front of the servants!”
“Call the guards and put a bullet in her head!”
Garrett did not move toward his fiancée.
He did not offer her a hand.
He did not even look down at her bleeding face.
Instead, he walked slowly into the center of the scullery, his polished dress shoes clicking over the scattered pearls.
He stopped three feet from Laura Beckett.
Laura stood her ground, her breathing steady, her knuckles reddened but unbroken, her eyes meeting his without a shred of apology.
Garrett looked at Laura’s knuckles, then slowly brought his gaze up to her eyes.
“Who sent you, Laura?” Garrett asked softly, his baritone filling the vast room.
Laura reached into her apron pocket and pulled out the small, leather-bound journal she had retrieved from the North Wing.
She held it out between them.
“Clara did,” Laura replied, her voice ringing clear and steady through the stone chamber.
“Two days before she was poisoned in the room above your head.”
Celeste froze on the floor, all color instantly draining from her battered face.
Garrett stared at the book in Laura’s hand.
The cold, detached mask he had worn for two years began to crack, revealing the terrifying, lethal predator lurking beneath the tailored wool.
He took the journal from Laura’s hand with slow, deliberate fingers.
He opened the first page, his eyes scanning the desperate handwriting of his dead sister.
Then, Garrett Hardwick turned his head slowly toward the woman crawling on the dirty floor.
“Bess,” Garrett commanded, without raising his voice.
“Yes, Mr. Hardwick?” the housekeeper whispered, trembling from head to foot.
“Pack Miss Vane’s belongings into garbage bags,” Garrett said, his tone chillingly polite.
“And lock the front gates.”
“No one leaves this estate until the sun comes up.”CHAPTER 7 — The Cold Trial in the Library
The heavy mahogany doors of the private library slammed shut with a sound like a tomb being sealed.
Garrett Hardwick turned the heavy brass key in the lock, pocketing it without glancing back at the woman sobbing on the Persian rug.
Celeste Vane was clutching her fractured jaw, blood smearing across her ruined emerald gown and pooling in the hollow of her collarbone.
Her vanity had been stripped away in a single punch, leaving behind only the raw, trembling terror of an animal caught in an iron trap.
Laura Beckett stood near the cold hearth, her hands clasped loosely in front of her gray uniform apron.
Her breathing was steady, her pulse calm, and her posture straight as an iron rod.
Garrett walked across the room toward the massive partner desk, setting Clara’s leather journal squarely under the green banker's lamp.
He pulled open the center drawer, retrieved a silver lighter, and lit a thick Churchill cigar with agonizingly slow precision.
The flame illuminated the sharp, predatory angles of his face and the lethal stillness in his dark eyes.
“Get up, Celeste,” Garrett said, his voice dropping into a register that made the windowpanes vibrate faintly.
Celeste coughed, spitting a dark crimson clot onto the priceless antique carpet.
“Garrett, you can’t believe that filthy liar,” she choked out, her words mangled by her swollen, dislocated cheek.
“She fabricated that book.”
“She’s an infiltrator sent by the federal prosecutors or the waterfront union.”
“She broke my face in front of your servants!”
“She assaulted the woman who is supposed to carry your name!”
Garrett blew a thick ring of blue smoke toward the high plaster ceiling.
“My sister Clara had a peculiar way of crossing her lowercase t's,” Garrett murmured, not looking at Celeste.
“She made a small hook at the base, an old habit from her years in the Swiss convent school.”
“No federal agent would know that detail.”
“No forgery expert in this city could replicate the exact slant of her third-finger tremor.”
He turned his gaze down toward Celeste, his eyes as black and merciless as frozen river water.
“This is Clara’s handwriting.”
“And you knew she was keeping it, didn’t you?”
Celeste’s eyes flickered with panic, darting toward the locked door, then toward the curtained windows.
“She was sick, Garrett,” Celeste stammered, pulling her trembling knees up to her chest.
“She was losing her mind after your mother died.”
“She was paranoid, she was imagining conspiracies, she was accusing everyone—”
“She was thirty-two years old and had the cardiovascular system of a marathon runner,” Laura interrupted coldly.
Celeste snapped her head toward Laura, her eyes blazing with desperate malice.
“Shut up!” Celeste screamed, spraying flecks of bloody saliva.
“Who the hell are you to talk about Clara Hardwick?”
“You’re a thirty-dollar-a-day scrubwoman from the county gutter!”
Laura reached into the collar of her starch-stiffened dress and pulled out a thin silver chain hidden beneath her linen collar.
Attached to the chain was a military dog tag and an engraved sterling silver locket.
She unhooked the clasp and laid the locket on the mahogany desk right beside Clara’s journal.
Garrett’s gaze dropped to the silver object, his fingers freezing around his cigar.
He recognized the locket instantly; it was the exact twin of the piece his mother had given Clara on her eighteenth birthday.
Inside the locket was a photograph of Clara smiling on an offshore yacht, standing arm-in-arm with a younger, sharper-eyed Laura Beckett in naval uniform.
“Laura Mercer,” Garrett whispered, the name rolling off his tongue like a forgotten memory from another lifetime.
“Clara’s logistics commander from the naval intelligence corps.”
“The woman Clara said saved her life in the Mediterranean when the supply convoy took fire.”
Laura met his eyes without flinching.
“Clara called me three weeks before she died,” Laura said, her tone devoid of theatrical grief, carrying only cold, immutable fact.
“She told me that her brother was surrounded by jackals he believed were business partners.”
“She told me that someone was tampering with her digitalis drops.”
“She asked me to come to the city and extract her before the autumn shipping contracts were finalized.”
Laura took half a step toward the shivering woman on the floor.
“I arrived at county morgue forty-eight hours too late.”
“The autopsy was signed off by a county coroner on Arthur Vane’s payroll within six hours of her death.”
“The cremation permit was fast-tracked before her own brother could even identify the body.”
Garrett’s jaw tightened until the muscles in his neck strained against his collar.
He looked down at Celeste, whose face was now entirely drained of color.
“You told me she requested immediate cremation in her handwritten will,” Garrett said, his voice terrifyingly quiet.
“You handed me that document yourself, Celeste.”
Celeste began to weep, not out of remorse, but out of the horrific realization that the cage had locked from the outside.
“My father said it was necessary,” she wept, clawing at the fringes of the rug.
“Clara was going to block the merger!”
“She was going to take the docklands public and expose the offshore shell companies!”
“Garrett, my father has two hundred armed men at the harbor right now!”
“If you harm me, he will burn every warehouse you own to the ground!”
Garrett looked at his watch with chilling indifference.
May you like
“It is twenty minutes past midnight, Celeste.”
“Your father is already running out of time.”
