Chapter 26 KNIGHT
KNIGHT
The door swings open as I make my way into Elias’s home.
Sure, it might be an unlawful search, but where Harper is involved, I can’t seem to give a shit.
There’s no line I wouldn’t cross, no mountain I wouldn’t climb to protect her.
Even if it means losing everything I have worked for. None of it matters to me without her.
It’s coming up on midnight, and from what I can tell, Mae isn’t home, which raises the question, where the fuck is she in the middle of the night?
It’s a Tuesday. What the fuck could she be doing?
Is she shacking up with the real father of that baby?
Taking advantage of the fact that Elias hasn’t returned, or is she out there searching for the next fool who’ll take her in?
The house is silent, and as I make my way from room to room, thoroughly searching and collecting any intel I can find, I can’t help but think of Harper.
This is destroying her. The guilt that rests on her shoulders is like nothing I’ve ever seen.
She feels everything so deeply. To her, she might as well have been the monster holding the blade that took Dr. McKullan’s life, and I know she blames herself for Anders being in that morgue when he was.
No amount of comfort has been able to help her, and as I watched her through the kitchen window this afternoon, I saw something shift inside her.
I’m losing her. All the progress she’s made since starting therapy dissipated before my eyes.
I need to be better for her. I need to finish this. And right now, I’m failing her. Every fucking step I take seems to be wrong, every direction I turn, I become more lost, and eventually, there’s not going to be anything left of her to save.
Making my way back down the stairs, I stop by Elias’s office, slipping inside the silent room to search every corner. I go through the papers on the desk, rifle through the drawers, and even go over the knickknacks left on the shelf.
Finding Elias’s filing system, I pull it open drawer by drawer, going through all the paperwork there for anything out of place, anything that could tell me if he bought any properties under the radar, but when you’re a billionaire with your fingers in every cookie jar, it’s almost impossible to decipher what holds meaning.
There are deeds for hundreds of businesses.
Restaurants. Two different malls. A furniture company.
A logistics and shipping business. A bakery.
A hotel chain. Everything under the sun is here when I come across the blueprints for this house.
I go to shove them aside, not seeing how they could be relevant for what I’m looking for, but something has me doubling back.
I grab the roll of paper and spread it out on Elias’s desk to look over it, checking every portion of the property, not even sure what I’m looking for.
A hidden panic room. A walk-in safe. Anything.
Only what I come across is much worse.
A basement.
The only problem is, this house doesn’t have a basement. There’s a large wine cellar. But no basement.
Unease pulses through my veins, and I search the blueprint for the entrance of this secret basement before finding something built into the butler’s pantry.
Without skipping a beat, I shove the blueprints back into the filing cabinet before slipping out of the office and leaving it exactly how I found it.
Once I’m in the kitchen, I make my way into the private butler’s pantry, and at first glance, everything looks as it should.
There’s no obvious door with a sign above it reading secret basement entrance here.
There’s nothing at all to suggest that anything is out of order.
Only as I start to look at the cabinetry a little closer, I find seams within the framework that look out of place, and as I fiddle around, pushing and pulling, the cabinetry falls back, revealing the entrance to the basement—a basement I can assure you that Mae has no fucking idea even exists.
A winding metal stairwell leads down into darkness, and I stand at the top for just a moment, listening for any signs of life down there, anything to suggest that Elias might be hiding out under our very noses, but I come up blank. That doesn’t stop me from pulling my gun, though.
I hold it out before me, ready to squeeze the trigger at a moment’s notice as I slowly enter the basement, taking careful steps with nothing but the light from a small flashlight.
When I find an overhanging string at the bottom, I pull on it, and a dull, yellow light fills the room. What I see makes my stomach crawl.
Cages upon cages line the wall, too big to house animals, and fitted with chains. Old bloodstains coat the ground. And the smell . . . It’s the smell of death.
A small table sits in the center of the basement, and as I look over it, I find image after image of Harper, spanning years of her life, even when she was a child, which was years before they came into our lives.
But they’re not the kind of photos Mae would have had lying around; they’re the kind of photos taken from bedroom windows, taken from a distance at parks, or at the mall with her friends, and I realize that Mae wasn’t the one who came barging into our lives. It was the other way around.
Elias constructed this. He’s been planning every step since Harper was just a girl, bringing Mae into his home and marrying her to gain access to her daughter. It’s fucking sickening.
No wonder he won’t give up. He’s put too many years into this, too much work, too much time spent dealing with Mae for the grand prize of claiming her daughter.
He needs to be stopped.
He needs to be put in the fucking ground.
Making my way deeper into the basement, I turn the corner and come to a startling stop near a dirty bed with chains cuffed to the headboard.
Beside it is a toilet and a vanity as well as a small chest of drawers with a mirror mounted on top, and damn it, none of this shit looks brand-new. It’s all been well used.
Just how many women has Elias had down here? Just how many lives has he taken?
Seeing something on the bed, I walk over to it, my chest aching as I take in the old bloodstains on the sheets. My gaze settles on the object in the middle of the bed, and I use the tip of my gun to flip it over, only to find the very mask that has haunted Harper’s dreams.
“Fuck,” I grit.
My stomach clenches with unease, and I hold back vomit.
My brother has always been a monster, but I never realized it could have possibly gone this far. I guess money buys power, and when you have that kind of power, nothing can stand in your way.
Trying to ignore the nausea growing in the pit of my stomach, I use my phone and start taking photos, documenting every last inch of the basement, and as I finally approach the stairs to leave, I realize that there’s no way out of this for him.
Jail time isn’t going to be nearly enough to pay for the crimes he’s committed in this room, the crimes he still plans to commit. I have to end his miserable life, and when I do, the world will be a better fucking place. I just hope that I don’t lose Harper before I get the chance.