Chapter 5 - The Breach at midnight
The storm hit Crestmont at 1:00 a.m., heavy rain lashing against the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of the sunroom, accompanied by rolling thunder that shook the stone foundations of the mansion.
Inside the ground-floor suite, Maisie lay awake under the heavy silk duvet. She wasn't frightened by the thunder—she liked the sound of rain, which transformed the invisible air into a dense, detailed map of drips, splashes, and rushing water.
Beside her bed, Cyrus was not sleeping.
The dog stood rigid on the velvet rug, his head raised, his nose pointed toward the heavy glass doors leading to the courtyard. A low, silent vibration was running through his spine—not a bark, nor a growl, but the pre-attack tension of a hound that had smelled something wrong in the wind.
Maisie sat up, pulling her wool coat over her nightgown. “Cyrus?”
The dog didn't turn back. He took three silent steps toward the glass door, his black lips pulling back slightly to reveal his canine teeth.
Through the heavy rush of the rain outside, Maisie heard it.
It wasn't thunder. It was a faint, wet click—the sound of a high-grade wire cutter snapping through the security fence five hundred yards away at the garden perimeter.
Then came another sound: the soft, wet slap of heavy rubber boots on mud, moving in a tactical four-man formation through the pine trees.
“Leo,” Maisie whispered, her heart giving a sharp, terrified leap.
She swung her legs out of bed, her yellow rubber boots already sitting beside her nightstand. She slipped them on, grabbed her wooden cane, and laid her hand on Cyrus’s collar.
“Quiet,” she whispered to the dog. “We have to go find Julian.”
She didn't try the locked hallway door. Instead, she walked straight to the courtyard glass door. The intruder who had cut the wire hadn't realized that Cyrus’s senses covered a thousand yards, not fifty.
As she reached for the latch, the lights inside the mansion flickered once, twice, and then went completely dark.
The emergency generator didn't kick in. The main power lines to the estate had been severed.
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In the sudden, pitch-black silence of the mansion, screaming began on the third floor.
It was Leo’s voice.
