Carrie #2
It took twenty-three minutes flat to reach the Ellery farmhouse.
If you could call it that. Just a single-story shotgun shack with a peeling tin roof and a yard so sparse the grass had given up.
Nothing like the marble-and-brass mausoleum I grew up in.
I let the engine idle, then cut it so the quiet thudded in my ears.
Eleanor Ellery was waiting for me on the porch, arms crossed over a faded cardigan, expression set to “I dare you.” Her hair was white, the kind that only happens when someone stops fighting the dye bottle and lets time win. The lines on her face said more than her eyes ever could.
“Ms. Stillwater,” she said, not even asking. She opened the screen door, and I followed, swallowing the bite in my voice for later.
Inside, it smelled like rosewater and cigarettes.
The furniture was every kind of old, threadbare, sagging, with those crochet covers people put on the arms to keep them from dissolving.
Eleanor waved me to a spot on the couch, then went to the kitchen without another word.
I heard the clink of glass and the slow drag of a fridge door before she returned with a jug of sweet tea and two chipped mugs.
We sat in silence while she poured, the liquid gold and too thick for August. She took hers black, I noted. When she finally looked at me, her eyes were sharp enough to cut bourbon.
“Let’s not pretend I don’t know why you’re here,” she said.
“Good. Then tell me why Marcus is trying to murder my company and my legacy in one go,” I shot back.
Her mouth twisted. “Always was dramatic. Like your father.”
I held her stare. “He claims he’s my brother. That my dad fathered him. You and he seem to think you’ve got proof.”
She snorted. “DNA, you mean. That’s a funny thing, DNA. Tells you who someone’s blood is, but not who they are.”
“Don’t get philosophical. Was William Stillwater Marcus’s father?”
She took a long swallow of tea. “No. And he knows it.”
I blinked, unsure whether to believe her. “That’s not what the test says.”
“Then the test is a lie,” she said, so flat I almost missed it.
I set my mug down, not caring that it left a ring on her table. “Explain.”
She exhaled, cigarette invisible but present in the way she worked her jaw.
“William Stillwater was a client. Nothing more. He came here to do business, same as every other fancy-pants bourbon man with a bottle and a problem. He and I—” she made a vague, dismissive gesture, “—had a drink or two. But my boy? His father was Jacob Ellery, just like it says on the birth certificate.”
She pointed across the living room, where a row of faded photographs lined the top of the TV. They were tiny, black-and-white, but the faces were clear. One was a young man, round-shouldered, dark-eyed, with Marcus’s chin but none of the Stillwater arrogance.
“Why is Marcus so certain?” I pressed. “He dropped a lab report on the boardroom like it was a grenade.”
Eleanor leaned forward. “Marcus always wanted what he couldn’t have.
Always obsessed with the Stillwaters, from the time he was old enough to pronounce your name.
First, it was your horses, then your distillery.
Then he figured he’d just take the whole lot by saying he was one of you.
” She smiled, but it was sad. “I told him a hundred times. But you can’t talk sense into a man who thinks he’s owed the moon. ”
I swallowed, the tea suddenly bitter. “So what—you’re telling me he faked the DNA?”
She shrugged. “He’s good with papers. Always has been. But I kept all the real ones, just in case.”
She rose, moving with more energy than her years should allow, and fetched an old manila envelope from a box under her chair.
She opened it, handed me a stack of brittle papers and a handful of photos.
School records, a birth certificate with Jacob Ellery’s name in careful cursive, medical forms. In every photo, Marcus was a head taller than the other kids, always at the back of the line, always looking past the camera. Never smiling.
“He’s been obsessed with your family since he was a boy,” she said, and this time her voice was pure exhaustion. “I’m sorry he hurt you. But you should know—he’ll stop at nothing to get what he wants. Even if it means burning everything else to the ground.”
I nodded slowly, hands shaking as I turned the photos over, one by one. It fit. The ambition, the sabotage, the calculated moves. I hated that I’d almost believed him. I hated that there was even a chance it could be true.
I looked at Eleanor, and for the first time, I saw not a rival matriarch but a survivor. A woman who knew exactly what men like Marcus could do, and still kept the receipts.
“Thank you,” I said, quietly.
She poured more tea. “Now, you get out there and show him what a real Stillwater does when someone threatens their kin.”
The way she said it, I felt it all the way to my bones.
I left the farmhouse as the sun dipped below the tree line. The evidence sat heavy in my lap, a stack of truths and lies waiting to be sorted. I glanced back once and saw Eleanor on the porch, watching the road, the air full of the smell of roses and the taste of battle to come.
The next morning, Shivs sent Canon to the lab.
He was the only man Shivs trusted to do it quiet and do it right—no fanfare, no threats, just the slow, relentless patience of a hunter who knows the best kill is the one nobody sees coming.
I spent the hours pacing the empty halls of Stillwater, every nerve in my body set to vibrate, waiting for the text or the call or even a fucking smoke signal that would tell me what my life had been reduced to: a bad forgery, a cruel joke, or a bullet I’d need to put in someone’s brain.
Canon called at 3:17 PM. “What's up?”
I barked a laugh. “Haven’t slept. What did you get?”
“Meet me in an hour,” he said. “Bring gloves.”
Shivs and I did.
The lab was off the bypass, a new construction with more security cameras than windows.
Canon was already waiting, leaning against his bike, thumbs ticking through a burner phone.
He wore a black jacket zipped to the throat, but I could see the tattoos at his wrists, the fresh ones that marked him as RBMC and something else besides.
He looked up as we parked, and the way he squared his shoulders told me it was bad. He and Shivs hugged it out.
He gave us each an N95 mask before we went in. “They don’t like strangers,” he said, eyes glinting. “Especially ones who look like trouble.”
Inside, the place was sterile, bright, humming with refrigeration units and the distant whine of centrifuges.
The air stung with bleach. Canon led the way past two receptionists and a security desk, moving like a man who’d cased the place twice already.
I clocked the security guard watching us, but he never left his post.
The tech was waiting in a side office, a windowless box stacked with sample racks and three monitors running code I couldn’t decipher. He was young—maybe thirty—but already balding, and his blue scrubs were wrinkled at the collar. When he saw Canon, he flinched, then tried to smile.
“Hey, man, you got my—?”
Canon shut the door, slow and final. “Tell my friend what you told me.”
Shivs put his hand on the small of my back.
The tech licked his lips. “I shouldn’t have, I know. I just needed the cash. It was a one-time thing.”
He looked at me, then away, then at the wall. “It was a woman,” he said, voice high and tremulous. “She said her name was Evelyn Hart. She brought the sample herself, pre-labeled, and paid me extra to run it as a rush. Two grand, in cash.”
“And?” I said, voice like a whip.
He fiddled with a pen, tapping it against the desk. “She told me to make sure it matched the Stillwater family sample on file. That’s all. Just make the report say they were first-degree relatives. I thought it was for legal—”
I slammed my hand on the desk. The pen went flying. “Did you even run the test?”
His hands went up. “I ran it! But the sample was already spiked, okay? The DNA was a one-to-one match with the reference, as if it were copied. That’s not possible. But the machine doesn’t know that.”
Canon pulled out his phone, hit RECORD, and set it on the desk. “Say it again. Everything.”
The tech stared at the phone, then at Canon, then at me. He looked like a man who’d just realized the people in front of him were not, in fact, the good guys. He swallowed, then started from the top, voice shaking but steady.
“I was paid by Evelyn Hart to fake a DNA test. The sample was rigged. The report is a lie.”
He looked at me, eyes pleading. “Can I go now?”
Shivs growled, and the man cowered.
I nodded. “You talk to anyone, we’ll know.”
He nodded, fast, and Canon ushered us out, phone already in his pocket.
Outside, I let myself breathe for the first time in hours. The sky was bruised, the color of overripe fruit. I felt like I could bite through it.
Canon handed me the phone. “It’s all there. Plus, he gave me the email trail—shows the time stamps, the logins, everything. Evelyn paid him through three layers of PayPal, but I got the accounts.”
I stared at the phone, then at Canon. “You sure about this?”
He grinned, wolf-bright. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s when a man’s scared enough to tell the truth.”
I nodded, the rage in me turning cold and perfect. “Thank you,” I said.
As we drove back to the mansion, I thought about all the ways people could be broken: by lies, by fire, by blood. But the worst was by trust. I rolled the phone between my hands, feeling the weight of it, the digital confession that would end one chapter and start another.
I turned and looked at Shivs. “You ready to make a mess?” I said.
His laugh was pure violence. “Born ready.”