Chapter 12 - THE GHOSTS IN THE REARVIEW
The old pickup truck rattled northward on Interstate 95.
The highway was empty at three in the morning.
The yellow center lines hummed beneath the tires like a low, continuous heartbeat.
Isabella was asleep against the passenger door, her head pillowed on an old canvas jacket.
Adrien kept one hand on the cracked steering wheel.
His shoulder ached with a dull, steady pulse, but the cut on his forehead had stopped bleeding.
On the floorboard between them sat Isabella’s small black suitcase.
He had retrieved it from the train car during the panic before the transit police sealed Track Nine.
It had been sitting on the floor where she left it.
He reached down with his free hand and unzipped the front pocket.
Inside was the small blue scarf she had left behind on the coat rack.
And beneath it, a photograph.
Not of her father.
It was a faded newspaper clipping from six years ago.
The day of his father’s funeral.
In the background of the cemetery crowd stood a twenty-two-year-old Adrien Voss, staring down into the open grave with a face carved from stone.
And in the corner of the photograph, barely visible among the mourners, was Isabella.
She hadn't come to his house two years ago by accident.
She hadn't applied through an agency.
She had followed him from the day his father was buried.
Adrien placed the photograph back inside the pocket.
He looked at her through the green glow of the dashboard lights.
Her eyelashes fluttered as she dreamed.
Her hand twitched against the coarse canvas of her jacket.
"You knew him," Adrien whispered to the empty cab.
She stirred.
Her eyes opened slowly, blinking against the road glare.
"Knew who?" she asked, her voice thick with sleep.
"My father."
She sat up slowly, rubbing the back of her neck.
"He came to our apartment the night before he died," she said quietly.
Adrien’s knuckles tightened on the wheel.
"Why?"
"He knew Mercer was poisoning him."
Adrien stared at the dark highway ahead.
"Mercer?"
"He used arsenic in the port wine," Isabella said.
"A little every week for six months."
"Your father knew his organs were failing."
"He knew the council was already meeting behind his back."
She looked at Adrien's profile.
"He told my mother that you were different."
"He said you had your mother's eyes."
"And that you would either burn the empire down, or let it eat you alive."
"So he gave her the silver key?"
"He told her to give it to someone who could use it to destroy the vault if the council ever tried to crown Mercer."
A cold wind whistled through the truck’s rusted floorboards.
"She waited four years," Isabella said.
"Then she got sick."
"Before she died, she made me promise to find you."
"Not to kill you."
"To make sure you didn't become him."
Adrien looked out at the dark pine forests of New Hampshire rushing past.
"I almost did," he said.
"I stood in that foyer this morning and I let you walk away because I was too proud to ask why you were bleeding."
Isabella reached out.
Her warm fingers touched the back of his hand on the steering wheel.
"You came to the train, Adrien."
"I came for the key," he lied.
She laughed softly.
A clean, beautiful sound that filled the drafty cab.
"You left the key in the coal chute."
"You came for me."
Adrien didn't deny it.
He turned off the highway onto a two-lane blacktop road marked with a wooden sign:
COASTAL ROUTE 1 — MOUNT DESERT ISLAND.
The scent of salt pine filled the heater vents.
Dawn was breaking over the Atlantic.
A pale, rose-colored light bled across the gray horizon, turning the clouds to mother-of-pearl.
The road wound up through granite cliffs overlooking a wild, rocky bay.
At the end of a long gravel driveway stood a small gray-shingled house.
No iron gates.
May you like
No surveillance cameras.
Just smoke curling from a stone chimney and the sound of waves crashing against the rocks below.
