Chapter 7 - The Third Heir
Julian backed away until his shoulders hit the rough pine wall of the cabin. His face was pale as chalk, his eyes wide in absolute disbelief.
"Gabriel..." Julian breathed, the name tasting like ash on his tongue. "No. Gabriel died of scarlet fever when he was six years old. It's in the family bible."
"Your father lied to you, Julian!" Margaret spat, pushing herself up from the chair with a sudden, unexpected surge of energy. She pointed a frail, shaking finger at Julian’s chest. "Your father didn't destroy Gabriel. He hid him away at St. Jude's Asylum to protect the family name! Arthur found out about Gabriel three months before the storm. He paid the guards to release Gabriel, dressed him in his own clothes, and used him as a phantom to commit his crimes!"
Clara stood up slowly, her mind reeling as the tangled web of lies tightened around her chest. "Why? Why would Arthur do that?"
"Because Arthur was embezzling millions from the timber company," Margaret revealed, stepping toward the center of the room. "He knew the auditors were closing in. He needed a body—a body that shared his DNA, wearing his ring and carrying his watch—to fake his own death so he could escape to South America with the stolen millions!"
Julian stared at Margaret, the blood rushing in his ears like a deafening waterfall. All those years... twenty-two years of guilt, twenty-two years of carrying the weight of being an accessory to murder, twenty-two years of letting his life stall in that empty, silent mansion—all built on a masterclass of psychological deception executed by his own brother.
"Arthur didn't die that night," Julian whispered, the pieces finally falling into place with a terrifying, mechanical precision. "The man Margaret struck on the hearth... was Gabriel. Arthur was waiting outside in the carriage. When he saw Margaret flee into the woods, he went into the study, left his ring on Gabriel’s corpse, set the room ablaze to destroy the evidence, and vanished."
"And he’s still alive," Margaret said, her voice dropping into a cold, hollow whisper. "He never left the country, Julian. He's been living in the shadows of this county for twenty-two years, waiting for the statute of limitations to expire, waiting for the estate's trusts to mature."
Suddenly, the heavy glass window on the north side of the cabin shattered into a thousand gleaming shards.
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A heavy, iron cylinder wrapped in smoking canvas crashed onto the hardwood floor, rolling across the planks until it knocked against Clara’s boot.
A thick, blinding cloud of yellow chemical smoke began to pour from the canister, instantly filling the tiny cabin with the suffocating stench of sulfur and burning gasoline.
