Chapter 4 - THE FOG OF BLACKWOOD
Rain lashed against the shattered windshield of the town car.
Vivienne dragged herself through the driver’s side door.
Glass cut through her jeans, slicing her palms.
She didn't feel the pain.
Her left arm remained curled tightly around her abdomen.
Protect the baby.
The thought repeated like a drumbeat behind her eyes.
The driver, an elderly man who had worked for her father for twenty years, lay slumped over the steering wheel.
A crimson pool spread beneath his silver hair.
Vivienne checked his neck with trembling fingers.
No pulse.
Tears blurred her sight, mixing with the freezing rain.
“I’m sorry, Thomas,” she whispered.
Shouts echoed from the highway above.
Flashlight beams sliced through the thick mist.
“She’s down the embankment!” a rough voice barked.
Heavy boots crushed wet pine needles.
Vivienne snatched her leather handbag from the wreckage.
Inside was her mother’s journal, her passport, and three thousand dollars in cash.
She scrambled down into the ravine.
The mud pulled at her boots.
Her lungs burned with every breath.
A sharp cramp gripped her lower abdomen, causing her to double over with a muffled gasp.
She sank behind a rotted hemlock log.
Not now, she prayed silently. Please, God, not now.
She stayed motionless in the frozen muck.
Two men in dark tactical gear walked along the creek bed twenty feet below her.
Both held suppressed submachine guns.
“Silvio said no witnesses,” one man muttered.
“Even the woman?”
“Especially the woman. Boss wants that drive, and he wants the Falcone bloodline ended tonight.”
Vivienne pressed her face into the damp moss.
Her heart hammered so violently she feared they could hear it above the rain.
Silvio.
Lorenzo’s uncle.
She had always known Silvio was poison.
She had tried to warn Lorenzo for eighteen months.
Lorenzo had dismissed her concerns as paranoia.
“You turned an arrangement into a fairy tale.”
His cruel words echoed in her ears, sharper than the cold biting her fingers.
He thought she ran because of hurt pride.
He didn't know she had discovered the assassination order on his desk two days ago.
Silvio wasn't just coming for her.
Silvio had orchestrated the entire border ambush that had sent Lorenzo home covered in another man’s blood.
The flashlights swept over the log.
Vivienne held her breath.
The beam lingered.
Then shifted away.
“Nothing here,” the gunman called out. “Check the culvert near the motel access road.”
Their footsteps faded into the steady roar of the storm.
Vivienne waited three excruciating minutes.
She dragged herself to her feet using the rough bark of a pine tree.
Her body shook violently from hypothermia.
Through the trees, the faint neon sign of an old roadside motel buzzed through the fog:
THE PINES MOTEL — VACANCY.
She stumbled out of the tree line and crossed the empty access road.
The night clerk, a hollow-cheeked teenager wearing headphones, didn’t even look up when she threw three hundred-dollar bills onto the counter.
“Room four,” he mumbled, tossing a brass key across the laminate. “End of the row.”
Vivienne locked the wooden door behind her.
She engaged the deadbolt and slid the security chain into place.
She collapsed onto the worn floral bedspread.
Her clothes were soaked in mud and blood.
She stripped off her wet sweater and curled into a ball beneath the thin wool blanket.
She placed both hands over her stomach.
“I’ve got you,” she whispered into the darkness. “I won’t let them touch you.”
Suddenly, the wooden floorboards outside creaked.
Heavy, measured footsteps stopped directly on her porch.
Vivienne froze.
A shadow blocked the amber light beneath the door.
The brass doorknob turned slowly.
Click.
The security latch rattled.
Vivienne reached into her bag and pulled out the small pearl-handled revolver her father had given her on her eighteenth birthday.
May you like
She raised it with both hands.
The wood around the lock splintered with a thunderous crash.
