Chapter 15 - Beatrice’s Last Trap
The mist thickened around us.
My mother began coughing.
Federal agents hammered against the locked doors.
Julian lay handcuffed on the floor, staring toward the vents.
“She’s killing me too.”
“You said she treated you like a son,” I said.
“She treats everyone like property.”
Nathan covered his mouth with his sleeve and searched the control panel.
“The ventilation is connected to the medical wing.”
Dr. Keene examined the mist.
“It’s a sedative, but the concentration could stop Anne’s breathing.”
My mother gripped my hand.
“Don’t leave me again.”
“I won’t.”
I meant it with every part of me.
Walter smashed a chair against one of the greenhouse windows.
The reinforced glass held.
Julian pulled a small keycard from inside his cuff.
“The emergency system.”
An agent took it.
“Why do you have this?”
“I funded the facility.”
“Your mother funded it,” I said.
His face tightened.
Even now, the truth humiliated him.
Nathan used the keycard.
Access denied.
Beatrice’s voice returned through the speakers.
“Claire, you always wanted your family back.”
A camera in the corner rotated toward us.
“Now you can die together.”
My mother looked up at the camera.
“Beatrice.”
Her voice was weak but steady.
“You were always afraid of women who couldn’t be bought.”
Beatrice laughed.
“I buried you for thirty years.”
“And still you lost.”
The laugh stopped.
My mother had survived decades of forced medication and isolation.
Yet Beatrice still couldn’t break her.
Walter struck the window again.
A thin crack appeared.
The agents joined him.
Julian crawled toward the control panel.
“There’s a manual pressure release beneath the floor.”
“Why didn’t you say that before?”
“Because it floods the room with freezing outside air.”
“Do it.”
He removed a metal grate and turned a valve.
Cold air exploded through the greenhouse.
The chemical mist pushed upward.
Walter shattered the cracked window.
Fresh air poured inside.
Agents carried my mother out.
Julian tried to run through the broken opening.
I caught his jacket.
He turned toward me with pure hatred.
“You have nothing without my name.”
I looked at him calmly.
“The company had my name before it ever had yours.”
Agents dragged him away.
Nathan traced Beatrice’s signal to a control room beneath Greenhaven.
Police surrounded it.
When they opened the door, they found the room empty.
A tunnel led into the woods.
Beatrice had escaped again.
But she left behind a wall of files.
Photographs.
Patient records.
Payment ledgers.
Information on dozens of people she had blackmailed, institutionalized, or financially destroyed.
My mother recognized several names.
“She built an empire out of secrets,” she said.
A monitor flickered on.
Beatrice appeared from an unknown location.
“You found the records I wanted you to find.”
She held up a sealed envelope bearing the Vale Meridian crest.
“But you still don’t know who ordered Harrison’s death.”
Julian heard her through an agent’s radio.
He stopped struggling.
For the first time, he looked genuinely confused.
Beatrice smiled.
“You thought I was the beginning, Claire.”
May you like
Then the transmission ended.
👉 Beatrice had admitted she was not the highest person in the conspiracy, and the sealed envelope she carried could lead to the real architect of Harrison’s murder.
