The Legacy of Ashes
Part 3
The silence of the cellar was broken only by the steady breathing of the newborn, swaddled in three layers of burlap and pressed against Elise’s bare skin beneath her coat. The warmth of the tiny, pulsating body was the only fire keeping Elise alive. Her name was Victoire. It wasn’t a name Elise had chosen beforehand; it was an inevitability born in blood and dust.
Sitting on the earthen floor, leaning against her father’s heavy oak desk, Elise let the pain of childbirth transform into a terrifying mental clarity. The dread and despair had melted away. In their place, a block of ice with sharp edges had formed in her mind.
The kerosene lamp cast a dying glow, projecting dancing shadows onto the stone walls. Elise looked down at her father’s medical file, still spread out at her feet. Digitalis. Gérard Moreau’s heart, this man as strong as an oak, hadn’t given out. It had been methodically destroyed. By Colette, without a doubt. The former nurse knew how to dose it, how to mask the symptoms, how to slip death into a cup of tea with a mother’s smile.
Elise thought back to her wedding. To Adrien’s gambling debts. Two million euros stolen. The Corsican mafia. The haste with which Adrien had tried to get the inheritance papers signed these past few days. Everything fit together with Machiavellian precision. If they let her freeze to death tonight, with the baby still in her womb, Adrien would inherit the usufruct and the majority stake in Moreau Patrimoine. He could liquidate everything, wipe out his debts, and live like a prince with his mother.
Except they’d forgotten one crucial detail: this house was Gérard Moreau’s kingdom. And Élise was its crown princess.
She gently placed Victoire in an old desk drawer lined with clean rags, making sure she was nice and warm. Then, using the edge of the drawer for support, Élise stood up. Her legs were trembling, her pelvis was aching, but the adrenaline was erasing the fatigue.
Her father was a paranoid architect and a home automation enthusiast before his time. When he restored this 19th-century building, he’d integrated a complex network. Élise made her way to the back of the cellar, where dampness seeped from the walls. She pulled aside a heavy tarp covered in cobwebs, revealing the property’s main electrical panel. A veritable command center, separate from the modern circuit breaker on the ground floor.
Élise smiled in the dim light. A smile that no longer bore any trace of the “quiet little wife.”
With a swift movement, she lowered three levers. Upstairs in the living room, the jazz music that had filtered through the floorboards fell silent instantly. The lights went out. The underfloor heating stopped pumping hot water.
Elise waited, her hand resting on the stone wall, listening. Through the ventilation ducts, the voices of Adrien and Colette reached her, muffled but panicked. “What’s going on?” Adrien swore. “The generator should have kicked in!” “Calm down,” Colette’s monotonous voice replied. “It’s a storm. The lines must have snapped. Go check the fuses in the pantry.”
Elise returned to the study. Searching through her father’s secret drawers, the ones whose mechanisms he had shown her when she was twelve, she found more than just the metal box. She found a cassette recorder, one of those old models from the 90s, as well as a black notebook.
She opened the notebook. The last pages, written in a trembling hand, dated from the days before Gérard’s death. “November 12th. I hired a private investigator. Colette Delmas isn’t a widow by accident. Her first husband, Adrien’s father, died of the same heart symptoms twenty years ago. Life insurance money collected. They started again with others. Wealthy old men on the French Riviera. They’re ruined, hunted, and I’ve delivered my only daughter to these monsters. The dictaphone contains the recording of my confrontation with Adrien. He threatened me. I have to flee with Élise, but I’ve felt so weak for the past few days…”
Élise’s blood ran cold. Serial killers. Cold, calculating parasites.
She picked up the dictaphone and checked the batteries. It switched on. She plugged the device into the old wall-mounted intercom box in the cellar, connected to the house’s internal communication system, which her father used to call her for dinner when he worked late.
Upstairs, Adrien’s footsteps echoed heavily on the parquet floor. He was approaching the pantry door, which led to the internal cellar stairs. Elise pressed the “All Rooms” button on the intercom and then pressed the “Play” button on the voice recorder.
The crackling sound filled the entire house, blasting from the speakers hidden in the ceilings of the living room, hallways, and bedrooms. Then, Gérard Moreau’s deep, angry voice boomed from beyond the grave: “You think I don’t know, Adrien? You gambled away my clients’ pension funds with the Rossi brothers. Two million! And you think you can use my daughter to pay off your blood debts?” “Adrien’s voice, recorded three years ago, replied, trembling with suppressed rage: ‘You won’t say anything, Gérard. You’re old. You’re tired. And Elise loves me. If you speak, I swear I’ll break your precious little doll. Mother knows how to handle people who talk too much.’”
In the living room, a scream of absolute terror froze Adrien in his tracks. The flashlight he was holding flew from his hands and rolled across the floorboards. “Mother!” he screamed, his voice breaking. “Mother, what was that?!”
Colette came into the hallway, her usual composure cracking with panic. “It’s impossible,” she hissed. “He’s dead. I personally emptied the ampoule from his IV drip at home. Someone’s in the house!”
In the cellar, Elise picked up the intercom microphone. She took a deep breath. Her voice, usually so gentle, escaped her throat like an icy whisper, amplified throughout the darkened house. “You’re right, Colette. Someone’s in the house.”
A deathly silence fell on the upper floor. “Elise?” Adrien stammered. “Is it… is it you? What… the door was locked! You should be…” “Freezing to death?” Elise finished over the intercom. “Like my father died of a heart attack? Like your father, Adrien?”
“Find her!” Colette screamed, finally losing her composure. “She’s in the sound system! She must be in Gérard’s office upstairs! Kill her, Adrien! Kill her with your bare hands if you have to, or the Corsicans will skin us alive tomorrow morning!”
Adrien’s heavy footsteps hurried toward the stairs leading upstairs. This was exactly what Elise wanted. She glanced at her watch, the one her father had given her. Three in the morning. The storm outside was still raging; the wind chill must have been close to minus fifteen degrees. The heating had been off for twenty minutes, and the uninsulated house was already starting to freeze.
While Adrien frantically searched the floors with a flashlight, Elise embarked on her final act of revenge. She returned to the electrical panel. She knew the best-kept secret of this building. Gérard’s wine cellar, a vast, armored room adjacent to the main cellar, had its own independent climate control system, designed to keep the fine wines at the perfect temperature, but more importantly, it was equipped with a vault door that could be electronically locked.
Elise gently opened the wine cellar door. She placed the maternity bag that Adrien had abandoned on the front steps in the center, prominently displayed under a shaft of moonlight filtering through a small skylight (she had retrieved it through the outside hatch before sealing it).
She picked up the microphone again. “Adrien…” she murmured plaintively, feigning exhaustion. “Adrien, I beg you… I’m in the wine cellar… The baby… The baby is here. I’m cold…”
The bait was cast. Her tormentors’ predatory instincts would do the rest. They knew that if the child was born alive, all their plans would collapse. The child had to be eliminated.
Less than a minute later, Elise heard the cellar door burst open at the top of the cellar stairs. The beams of two flashlights swept across the stone steps. “She’s downstairs!” Adrien shouted. “Be careful,” Colette spat. “She’s been going through Gérard’s things.”
Élise had hidden behind the heavy retaining wall, clutching Victoire tightly. She held her breath. Adrien and Colette went downstairs. They saw the wine cellar door wide open. They saw the maternity bag on the floor.
“She’s hiding in there,” Adrien said, his breathing coming in ragged gasps. “I can’t see her…” They both entered the reinforced room. “Élise!” Adrien called, his voice falsely gentle. “Come here, darling. We’re going to take you to the hospital. You’ve been very brave, but it’s over.”
It was at that moment that Élise stepped out of the shadows. She was no longer trembling. She looked at the man she had thought she loved, and the woman who had poisoned her world. She placed her hand on the heavy steel lever outside the reinforced door. The metallic clang startled the two murderers, who whirled around. Their flashlights illuminated Elise. Her face was smeared with sweat and dirt, her hair matted, her clothes covered in dried blood. She clutched a burlap sack to her breast. She resembled a vengeful goddess risen from the underworld.
“Elise! Don’t do this!” Adrien yelled, rushing forward. “The child complicates everything, Adrien,” Elise replied, her voice utterly cold. “That’s what you said.”
With a powerful movement, she slammed the enormous reinforced door shut. The crash was deafening. She pulled down the lever and turned the electronic lock. Inside, Adrien’s fists slammed against the solid steel. “Open this door, you filthy bitch!” he yelled, his true nature finally revealed. Open up, or I’ll kill you! — It’s a bank vault door, Adrien, replied Elise, moving closer to the intercom that connected to the inside of the wine cellar. Dad wanted to protect his vintages. And you know what? The refrigeration system still works.
