Chapter 26 - The Secret Room Beneath the Wine Cellar
Elena didn't scream. She didn't drop the champagne glass.
She turned to Julian, who was watching her with an eager, barely concealed tension, his eyes darting to the glass in her hand. He wanted her to drink. He needed the pregnancy terminated before the probate courts ratified the trust tomorrow morning.
Elena smiled, a slow, radiant, venomous smile.
"Julian," she whispered, stepping close enough that her perfume—the heavy, suffocating jasmine that had belonged to his mother—drifted into his nostrils. "You should have checked the vintage."
Before he could react, Elena grabbed the back of Julian’s silk tie, jerked his head down, and forced the rim of the flute between his teeth.
Julian choked, his eyes bulging in horror as three ounces of aconite-laced champagne poured down his throat. He gagged, spitting and flailing, knocking the crystal glass to the floor where it shattered with a sharp ringing crack that echoed through the ballroom.
"My husband seems to have taken ill," Elena announced loudly to the stunned room, her voice commanding and calm. "Security, escort Mr. Montgomery to his quarters and summon the medical team."
Panic rippled through the black-tie crowd as Julian fell to his knees, clawing at his throat, frothing at the mouth as the paralytic hit his vocal cords.
Elena didn't wait to watch him die. She spun on her heel and moved toward the service entrance behind the grand conservatory.
She slipped into the servant corridors, descending the spiral service staircase that led deep beneath the mansion into the limestone wine cellars. Her pulse hammered in her ears like a tribal war drum.
*She's alive.*
The body they had identified in Gravesend Bay had been a decoy—a corpse from a morgue or an unfortunate lookalike, burned beyond recognition. Victoria had orchestrated her own resurrection.
Elena reached the lowest level of the cellar, where century-old oak casks of Bordeaux lined the damp stone walls. At the far end of the corridor, behind a false wall masked as an iron-bound port cask, an electronic biometric keypad glowed red.
Elena stepped up to it. She pressed Victoria’s emerald signet ring into the slot, then placed her thumb against the scanner.
*Access Granted.*
The heavy stone door swung inward with the silent hiss of pneumatic seals.
Inside was not a vault of gold or cash. It was a high-tech surveillance bunker. Wall-to-wall monitors displayed every room in the Newport manor—including the ballroom where Julian was currently being pumped full of atropine by his private doctors.
Sitting in a high-backed leather chair in the center of the room, her back turned to Elena, sat the veiled woman.
"You always were quick on your feet, Elena," the woman spoke. But the voice wasn't Victoria’s raspy, tobacco-cured purr.
It was younger. Sharper.
The woman stood up, turned around, and lifted the black veil.
It was Charlotte Montgomery—Julian’s younger sister, the girl who had supposedly died of a heroin overdose in a Swiss sanitarium five years ago.
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"Julian is an idiot," Charlotte said, casually tossing a silenced Beretta onto the steel desk between them. "And Mother was a dinosaur. Did you really think you were the only daughter she bred in the dark?"
***
