𝑮𝒐𝒅 𝑶𝒇 𝑳𝒐𝒗𝒆

When the chaos arrives

                                                                                    ELI

The estate doesn't breathe. It waits. We don't bring strangers here. Only the ones we mean to break. Being at the top of business chain doesn't only mean we have best strategy, best marketing or best ideas to push our growth, it also means we gets our hands dirty. Indirectly. 

This estate was used by us, no furnished rooms, no renowned doors or windows, no trimmed lawns, nothing. It's made to look as if it was abandoned with only  few spare rooms built to survive if we ever need it. 

After discharged from hospital we took Adam and his sons to the estate. I'm still processing the fact that Adam came so close to kill my mother years ago. It makes me want to kill him with my bare hands. But I wait because I don't let myself driven with intrusive thoughts, I plot and finish them. 

Carter and Ashton are in the east cellar together, but isolated. One camera. No sound. No clocks. No windows. No human contact unless we want it. Ashton's been crying since the second night. Carter won't look at him.

As for Adam we gave him the old generator room. The floor still stinks of fuel and rusted blood from when we used it to cut off a loose end some time back. He sits on a chair under a swaying bulb, wrists zip-tied behind the backrest, ankles taped.

He hasn't said a word in two days.

Mum was the first to visit Adam. No words were exchanged. She just stood in the doorway, her heels echoing off concrete as she tapped it against the floor while she watched him like he was something she meant to dissect. Piece by piece.

Then Aunt Silver went in.

She had a folder in her hands.

The one with everything he ever did, every time he showed up near us, every fake name, every threat, every attempt to fracture our families from the inside.

As Aunt Silver went on and on about his plotting, he didn't flinch, didn't speak. But when she leaned in close and whispered something, I don't know what, he went still.

Not afraid. Not smug. Just still.

And then he laughed.

That's when I knew something was wrong. No man who is isolated from his sons, the outer world, captured by his enemies will have the will to laugh.

That laugh was pure smug. Pure Evil.

"We missed something," I said that night. "He's sitting on a kill switch."

Uncle Cole crossed his arms. "So we dig him out before he pulls it."

Dad didn't say anything. Just stared at the surveillance feed. Adam's motionless figure, eyes closed, mouth bloodied from where he bit through his cheek greeted us on the screen. He didn't want to talk. He wanted us to think.

And it was working.

We went to Carter next. He was the weakest of the three. Not physically, he's always been a brute in a racing jacket but emotionally.

I have a suspicion that Carter's loyalty to Adam is hanging on a thin thread. I only have to pull it hard enough to snap it.

I gave him silence. For hours. Sat across from him in a chair identical to Adam's.

Eventually, he cracked. Expected.

"He made us do it," Carter muttered, shaking. "You think we wanted this? Ashton wanted to run. I begged him. But Adam he said if we backed out, we'd disappear.