THUD.
Diego collapsed onto his knees on the concrete with a breathless, strangled groan, spitting saliva onto his shoes.
“Silence the fool,” Caldwell said softly. His deep, resonant baritone boomed through the quiet wharf like a bronze bell.
Caldwell walked down the final three steps of the gangway, stopping ten paces from where Marcus and I stood.
A warm, aristocratic smile spread across the general’s face—the smile of a monarch greeting a long-lost princess before her execution.
“Laura,” Arthur Caldwell spoke, opening his arms in a theatrical gesture of familial warmth. “My beautiful, brilliant niece. You have your mother’s eyes. And your grandfather’s stubborn, foolish pride.”
Featured image URL
I did not flinch. I did not step back.
I stood with my spine locked in textbook posture, looking at the man who had orchestrated thirty years of treason against my family.
“Arthur Caldwell,” I said, my voice smooth as surgical glass and chilled to sub-zero density. “You look remarkably healthy for a man who died in a burning helicopter in 1996.”
