Chapter 2 - The Secret of the Fire
Lucas pulled his shirt off his shoulder to wrap around the shivering toddler, who was coughing weakly against his neck. The baby’s skin was burning with a dangerously high fever.
"Lucas! What are you doing?!" Victoria marched down the aisle, her expensive heels clicking angrily. Her mother, Eleanor Montgomery, followed close behind, her eyes darting nervously toward the row of high-society photographers whose cameras were flashing relentlessly.
"Get up right now, Lucas!" Victoria demanded, grabbing his bare arm. "You are embarrassing me! You are embarrassing my family! Have your assistants give these beggar children a hundred dollars and let's finish the ceremony!"
Lucas turned his head slowly. The look in his hazel eyes was so terrifyingly cold, so completely devoid of warmth, that Victoria instinctively took a step back, her hand falling away from his arm.
"If you speak about my daughters like that again, Victoria," Lucas said in a low, dangerous growl that sent shivers down the spines of everyone within earshot, "I will burn the Montgomery estate to the ground by midnight."
"Daughters?!" Victoria’s mother, Eleanor, shrieked, her voice cracking with panic. "That's impossible! You told us your ex-wife and your child died in a car fire in Chicago two years ago! The police report said the car burned to ash!"
"They told me she died," Lucas said, his eyes locking onto Eleanor’s pale, trembling face. He noticed the way Eleanor’s hands were shaking, the way her eyes darted toward her private security chief standing near the exit. "The hospital gave me a sealed urn. They told me there were no survivors."
Lily pulled her face back from Lucas’s shoulder, her small hand reaching into the pocket of her ragged coat. She pulled out a crumpled, soot-stained piece of paper and pressed it into Lucas’s hand.
"Mommy gave me this before the dark men took her away three days ago," Lily whispered, her small voice echoing in the quiet cathedral. "She told me to run to the city... she said the lady with the yellow hair was paying the fire men to keep us hidden..."
Lucas opened the crumpled paper. Written in faded, shaky blue ink was the unmistakable handwriting of his lost wife, Clara:
Lucas, if Lily finds you, they are coming to finish what they started in Chicago. Victoria's mother built the trap. Save our baby, Maya. Don't trust the Montgomerys.
Lucas slowly turned his gaze from the paper to Eleanor Montgomery. The elderly matriarch’s face had turned completely white, like a corpse in a shroud.
"Arthur!" Lucas shouted toward his chief of security standing at the doors.
May you like
"Sir!" the broad-shouldered man called out, stepping forward instantly.
"Lock every exit in this cathedral," Lucas commanded, lifting both of his daughters into his arms as he stood up. "Nobody leaves. Call my private medical team to the vestry, and get the Chief of Police on my personal line right now."
