## CHAPTER 16 — THE LAKE HOUSE
Logan did not remember pushing Claire.
But the accusation followed him back to the estate.
He saw fragments.
Rain against the lake-house windows.
Claire shouting.
A broken glass.
His father standing beside the fireplace.
Then darkness.
Hale arranged a medical examination.
Tests found no current abnormalities, but an old scan revealed scar tissue near Logan’s temple.
The injury had never appeared in his medical records.
“Someone treated you privately,” the neurologist said. “And given your memory loss, drugs may have been involved.”
Logan returned to the lake house for the first time in seven years.
Noah stayed with Hale’s trusted child specialist.
The property had remained locked since Claire’s death.
Inside, dust covered everything.
Logan entered the bedroom.
A section of the wooden floor had been replaced.
He tore up the newer boards.
Beneath them was a bloodstained shirt.
His shirt.
There was also a broken syringe and a voice recorder.
The recording began with Claire confronting Edmund.
“You cannot keep testing people,” she said.
“The research will protect this family,” Edmund replied.
“It destroyed Evelyn.”
“Evelyn was unstable.”
“You made her unstable.”
Logan’s voice appeared next.
“What research?”
Then came a struggle.
Claire shouted Logan’s name.
Edmund ordered someone to restrain him.
A second male voice said, “Increase the dose.”
Logan groaned.
Claire screamed.
“You’ll kill him!”
The recording ended with a splash outside.
Logan had not pushed Claire into the lake.
He had been drugged while trying to protect her.
Someone else had taken her.
Hale examined the broken syringe.
The manufacturer had stopped producing that model eighteen years earlier.
The same model appeared in photographs from Facility Seven.
That evening, Vanessa regained consciousness.
She asked to speak immediately.
This time, Hale remained in the room.
“Evelyn is alive,” Vanessa said.
Logan placed the silver lion ring on the table.
“Where has she been?”
“Building her own version of the Board.”
“Why take Elena?”
“Because Elena knows which Mercer daughter was supposed to inherit everything.”
Logan frowned.
“Claire was my wife. Evelyn was my sister.”
Vanessa shook her head.
“No, Logan.”
She looked at him with something close to pity.
May you like
“One of them was never your sister.”
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