Chapter 20: Into the Abyss
The darkness in the penthouse was absolute, pierced only by the faint, eerie glow of the city lights far below through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Margaret pressed her back against the cool mahogany surface of her desk, her fingers gripping the cold steel grip of the revolver in her pocket.
The footsteps grew closer. Clack. Clack. Clack.
The exact same rhythmic, deliberate cadence as Arthur Vance’s cane—yet Arthur was locked in a maximum-security federal medical wing three hundred miles away.
“Who’s there?” Margaret called out, her voice ringing clear, steady, and utterly fearless through the dark, cavernous office.
The footsteps stopped just outside the open doorway of her office. A tall silhouette materialized against the dim ambient light of the hallway, leaning heavily on a cane, wearing a wide-brimmed fedora and a dark wool coat.
“You always were far too intelligent for your own good, my dear,” a voice rasped from the shadows—not Arthur’s voice, but a voice so chillingly familiar, so deeply buried in her earliest childhood nightmares, that it made her breath stop entirely.
It was a voice she had not heard since she was three years old, whispered through the smoke of a burning nursery.
Margaret raised her revolver, her hands locked in a rigid, unwavering stance as she aimed directly at the center of the silhouette.
“Step into the light,” Margaret commanded, her voice cutting through the silence like a blade of ice. “Or I promise you, this is where your story ends.”
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The shadowy figure chuckled softly, a low, rasping sound that echoed off the glass walls, and slowly raised one hand to push back the brim of the hat.
The cliffside wind howled against the distant Manhattan glass, and as the moonlight caught the stranger’s face, Margaret’s eyes widened in sheer, unimaginable horror at the final, shocking truth standing before her.
