Chapter 4 - The Patriarch's Lie.
The cassette clicked off.
Lucas stared at the recorder as if it had bitten him.
All his life, Gideon had been the one person he trusted without question.
The old man had rescued him from the fire, paid for his education, and promised him control of Vale Holdings.
Now Gideon's recorded voice had ordered his death.
Vanessa watched the shock settle over him.
“Still eager to save your new sister?”
Amelia stepped toward the cassette.
“Why would you show us this?”
“Because Lucas was always Grandfather's favorite.”
Jealousy sharpened every word.
“I want him to know what that love was worth.”
Lucas lifted the recorder and rewound several seconds.
The tape hissed before Gideon's sentence.
Then, almost too faint to hear, a door slammed and a man coughed.
The voice that followed sounded like Gideon, but one word carried the wrong cadence.
Lucas had heard his grandfather pronounce the family name ten thousand times.
On the tape, “Lucas” sounded rehearsed.
“This is edited,” he said.
Vanessa's expression tightened.
Amelia noticed a modern adhesive seam along the old cassette shell.
Someone had opened it recently and replaced part of the magnetic tape.
Before she could point that out, smoke curled under the nursery door.
Vanessa spun toward it.
“Mother said she would wait.”
Heat climbed the walls.
The lock had reengaged, and the jade pendant no longer opened it from inside.
Lucas wrapped a blanket around his hand and struck the window with the hammer.
The glass did not crack.
Security glass had replaced the original pane.
Amelia searched the crib and found a brass lever hidden beneath its rail.
When she pulled it, the crib rolled aside, revealing a narrow dumbwaiter shaft.
“That cannot hold all three of us,” Vanessa said.
“It does not have to,” Amelia replied.
She pushed Vanessa toward the opening first.
Vanessa looked genuinely confused.
“After what I did downstairs?”
“I am not your mother.”
The sentence landed harder than the hammer.
Vanessa squeezed into the dumbwaiter, then Amelia followed despite the pain in her shoulder.
Lucas lowered them using an emergency crank before climbing onto the service ladder himself.
Flames consumed the nursery as they descended.
Halfway down, a metal door opened beneath Amelia's feet.
Ruth reached from the darkness and pulled her into a hidden passage.
Her lip was split, and plastic ties cut into her wrists.
“Margaret locked me in the old clinic,” she whispered.
Lucas freed her while Vanessa stood apart, trembling.
Ruth saw the cassette and shook her head.
“That recording is bait.”
“Whose voice is it?” Lucas asked.
“A man your aunt paid to imitate Gideon.”
Ruth led them through the passage toward the servants' stairs.
She explained that Gideon had discovered Amelia's identity six months earlier through a private DNA search.
He hired Amelia to bring her safely inside the estate while he rebuilt the evidence against Margaret.
Before he could reveal the truth, his medication was changed.
“The stroke was poisoning,” Ruth said.
Amelia stopped walking.
“Where is Gideon now?”
Ruth looked toward the ceiling.
“Margaret moved him out of his room after dinner.”
Footsteps thundered behind them.
Vanessa seized the cassette and ran toward the clinic.
Lucas started after her, but Ruth caught his sleeve.
“Let her go.”
“She has the evidence.”
“No,” Ruth said.
“She has the copy Margaret wanted you to find.”
Ruth opened her palm.
Inside lay a tiny brass key stamped with a green snail.
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“The real confession is inside Gideon's coffin.”
THE JADE SNAIL | A VALE FAMILY THRILLER
