Chapter 8 - The Invitation Written in Blood
Rose was transferred again before dawn.
This time, Mara did not tell the local police where she was going. Daniel arranged a private ambulance through an old federal contact, and Clara rode beside her grandmother beneath a wool blanket while rain hammered the roof.
Rose woke halfway to the safe house.
“Did you find the vault?” she asked.
Clara nodded.
“And the girl?”
Clara stiffened. “You knew about June?”
Rose turned her face toward the window. “I knew there had been children kept beneath the clinic. I did not know any remained.”
“You knew I was in the film.”
Rose closed her eyes.
Clara’s anger came quietly. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
“I was trying to give you a childhood.”
“You gave me a lie.”
Rose’s eyes opened, wet and exhausted. “Sometimes a lie is the only wall between a child and people with power.”
Clara touched the locket. “What did Victoria mean when she said I survived?”
Rose hesitated.
The ambulance slowed near a toll gate. Daniel sat in front with the driver. Mara followed in another vehicle.
“Your mother was pregnant with twins,” Rose said at last. “One child was believed stillborn. You lived. Evelyn later found evidence that the second baby had also lived and had been taken into Aurora.”
Clara’s fingers went numb.
“Violet?”
“We never knew.”
“Then the girl in the photograph—”
“Could be your sister. Or she could be another child selected because she resembled you.”
The ambulance stopped abruptly.
A truck blocked the road. Two men in highway uniforms approached. Daniel looked back through the divider.
“Stay down.”
One of the men raised a shotgun.
The ambulance driver accelerated. The truck struck their side. Metal screamed. Clara was thrown against the wall. Rose’s medical monitor toppled.
Daniel fired through the windshield, forcing the attackers behind the truck. Mara’s car rammed the roadblock from behind. Within seconds, they escaped down a service lane.
Rose’s stitches had opened.
They reached the safe house, an abandoned convent outside Grayhaven, and a doctor stabilized her. On Rose’s blanket, blood had soaked through in the shape of a dark flower.
Inside the torn lining, Clara found an envelope.
Someone had sewn it there before the transfer.
The front bore Victoria Ashford’s crest.
Inside was a gala invitation printed with Clara’s full name.
Beneath it, in red ink, were the words:
YOUR MOTHER WILL BE AT TABLE SEVEN.
Daniel wanted to burn the invitation.
Clara wanted to go.
“They expect us,” Mara said. “That means we can prepare.”
“They expect a child,” Daniel replied. “They do not expect us to use her as bait.”
Clara looked at him. “They have used children as bait for twenty years. The difference is that I know the trap is there.”
Rose, pale beneath the blankets, reached for Clara’s hand.
“The gala is where Evelyn wanted the truth exposed. But the message in the tunnel said not to trust Hart.”
“Do you trust him?” Clara asked.
“I trusted the man he used to be.”
They spent the next twelve days building a plan.
Clara studied the ballroom’s electrical system and programmed the remote to send any selected camera feed to the giant stage screen. Mara arranged for federal agents to attend disguised as donors and staff. Daniel copied the film reel and distributed encrypted versions to three journalists with instructions to publish if he failed to contact them by midnight.
June remained hidden. She slowly remembered fragments: a white room, Victoria’s voice, children taught to answer to new names, and a woman called Doctor Bell who sometimes slipped food beneath locked doors.
“She told me to wait for the mirror,” June said. “She said the mirror would break the house.”
On the eve of the gala, Clara received a voice message from an unknown number.
Her mother’s voice filled the bookstore.
“Clara, do not come tomorrow. Victoria knows about the remote. The chairman’s table is not a vault. It is a trigger. If the foundation is opened during the gala, the entire underground archive will burn.”
Daniel replayed the message.
“The voice is real,” he said.
Clara remembered the instruction in her mother’s letter.
If you ever see me again, ask what happened on your seventh birthday.
The message continued.
“I know you will want proof it is me. You gave me a paper crown with six blue stars.”
Clara looked at Daniel.
There had been seven stars.
May you like
The voice was almost perfect.
Almost.
