Chapter 6
The sun began to dip below the horizon, replacing the bright, clean daylight with the vivid, intense colors of dusk. Neon blues and deep oranges painted the sky outside Emma’s private townhouse in the city. The interior of her home was minimalist, elegant, and heartbreakingly quiet without the sound of Sofia’s laughter.
Emma moved through the brightly lit rooms with frantic, calculated precision. She had stripped off her mourning dress, changing into dark slacks, a fitted black turtleneck, and flat, silent running shoes. She pulled her hair back into a tight, severe ponytail. The refined, elegant widow was gone; she was preparing for a break-in at the very estate she used to call home.
She walked into Sofia’s bedroom. The room was a riot of bright pastel colors, exactly as the six-year-old had left it. Emma approached the small nightstand and picked up Sofia’s backup tablet—the twin to the one the police now held.
Emma plugged the device into her laptop. If Daniel and Vanessa had killed her daughter in the east wing guest room, there had to be a reason. Why were they in that specific room? What was Sofia doing there?
Emma’s fingers flew across the keyboard, accessing the cloud backups of Sofia’s interactive toys. She pulled up the audio logs from the day of the murder. The metadata matched the video she had shown at the funeral.
She clicked play. The clean, crisp audio filled her silent townhouse.
“Give it to me, you little brat!” Vanessa’s voice shrieked through the speakers.
“No! It’s Mommy’s!” Sofia’s small, terrified voice cried out.
“Daniel, grab her! If she shows Emma those papers, we lose the entire trust fund!” Vanessa yelled.
A loud thud echoed through the audio, followed by the sound of the slap Emma had already seen on video. But the audio continued past the video's cutoff.
“Shut her up!” Daniel roared. “Just get the folder!”
Another heavy, sickening thud resonated, followed by a terrifying, absolute silence.
“Daniel... she’s not breathing,” Vanessa’s voice whispered, completely devoid of her earlier rage, replaced by pure, unadulterated panic. “Oh my god, her head hit the marble corner.”
“Grab her legs,” Daniel commanded, his voice cold and terrifyingly pragmatic. “We take her to the lake. We leave the gate open. It’s an accident.”
Emma stopped the recording. She sat in the bright, sterile light of her laptop screen, unable to breathe. Her beautiful face was entirely drained of color. The tears she had held back all day finally spilled over her rosy cheeks, falling silently onto the keyboard.
They hadn't just struck her. They had murdered her over a folder of papers. The trust fund. Sofia was the sole heir to the late Thomas Carter’s multi-million dollar estate. If Sofia died, the money defaulted back to Margaret and Daniel.
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Emma wiped her tears away with the back of her hand. Her grief was a bottomless ocean, but right now, it was frozen solid. She unhooked the laptop, slipped the audio files onto a secure USB drive, and dropped it into her pocket.
She needed to get into the east wing of the Carter estate tonight. She needed to find the blood on the baseboards and the folder they had killed her daughter for, before Margaret’s cleaners erased every trace of Sofia’s murder.
