All Chapters of The Devil's Fortune : Chapter 101
- Chapter 103
103 chapters
The first subject
Marcel pushed open the heavy steel door, stepping into a dimly lit conference room smelling of damp carpet and rust. Marcus and Elias followed closely behind him.Daniel Vale sat at the head of a laminate folding table. Lily sat beside him in a plastic chair, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. Her hair was messy and her eyes were red, but she looked whole.Marcel took two fast strides toward his sister. "Lily!"Daniel raised a broad, calloused hand, his knuckles scarred. "Stop right there, Marcel. Don't turn this into a fight.""Get away from her," Marcel rasped, his eyes burning as he glared at the older man."Dad?" Marcus stepped past Marcel, his voice shaking uncontrollably as he stared at Daniel. "You let Mom grieve for nine years. You let me think you were at the bottom of the river. Why?"Daniel didn't look at his son immediately. He kept his gaze fixed on Marcel. "I'll answer your questions, Marcus. But Marcel needs to look at this first.""I don't want your files, Daniel
The sacrifice
Marcel didn't wait for morning. The rain hit the windshield of the SUV in heavy, irregular slaps as he drove through the dark gates of the Greenwich estate. Beside him, Lily kept her hands folded tightly in her lap, her knuckles white, while Eleanor and his mother sat in tense silence in the back row."The gate shouldn't have opened, Marcel," Marcus muttered from the passenger seat, his tablet casting a pale blue glow over his face. "The security grid recognized your facial structure and disarmed the perimeter. That isn't a glitch.""It's an invitation," Marcel said, shifting into park near the main steps. "Stay close."They pushed open the front doors. The grand foyer was dead quiet, the air smelling of stale cedar and cold stone. No guards stepped out from the wings. No staff walked the halls.Instead, a single long mahogany table sat in the center of the drawing room, lit by a single overhead spotlight. Arranged across its surface in neat, chronological rows were framed photographs
The cage and the key
The sharp crack of the gunshot echoed through the hall, but when Marcel burst into the study, there was no blood.Only a spiderweb of shattered glass in the window, a single slug buried deep in the plaster, and Elias's silver smartphone resting face-up on the rug.Marcus lunged forward, picking up the device with trembling hands. His thumb flew across the screen, his face dropping as he deciphered the audio log. "It was a speaker delay. A compressed air charge and a timed audio spike. He staged the gunshot.""He flushed us into the lower level," Marcel said, his jaw tightening until his teeth ached. "He's still playing us.""Wait, Marcel, look at the screen," Lily said, stepping over the glass shards to stand beside Marcus. "He didn't wipe the root directory before he ran. He left the decryption key active."Marcus tapped the prompt, and a heavy magnetic latch clicked in the floorboards behind the desk. A narrow steel spiral staircase led down into a concrete sub-basement.They descen