Page 108 of The Chain House

His mask shifted like he’d just smiled behind it. “No … no … now I am Montresor,” he said. “Here, at night, on my vineyard, I am always Montresor. Luther built this for me, you know.” He looked at his watch. “He’ll be dead soon.”

“Batise?”

“Yes.”

“And then what?”

“Soon Oliver Crown will rise from the ashes and create the new world order.”

“You say that as if you’re jealous, Montresor …”

“Montresor is jealous of no one.”

“Is Luther still in there?”

“Yes.”

“Can I speak to him?”

He watched her, said nothing.

“Can he hear me?”

He leaned forward in his chair but didn’t respond.

“Tell him I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything that ever happened to him.” From her left hand she revealed a puzzle piece. She showed him. “I’m sorry for not taking him in as a boy. I’m sorry he was beaten and abused, and no one ever did anything about it, but tell him I tried.”

“He says you didn’t try hard enough.”

“I know that now,” Beth said, holding out the puzzle piece, nodding toward the puzzle she’d been working on the floor. “Have Luther finish the border for me. I know he was good at puzzles.”

Montresor, or whoever the fuck he was now, inched forward in his chair, and then stood.

Beth started crying; they weren’t fake tears, because in an instant she was back inside her office as a young, new psychiatrist and Luther was a boy who was so damaged she didn’t know what to do for him. Now she held out the puzzle piece to him, coaxing him closer, and in his movement, she could tell something had changed. He was no longer the cocky, confident man who’d been sitting in the chair seconds ago, but now appeared somehow smaller, like a Jekyll to the previous Hyde, like a passive boy instead of the monster she knew he was.

He knelt on the floor, took the puzzle piece from her, and moved it toward the lone gap in the Swiss Alps border.

And Beth, in her best child psychiatrist voice, said, “There you go. You’re doing great.”

He nodded.

And Beth said, “Luther?”

And when he turned, she clutched the bottom of the typewriter key Emily had given to her through the hole in the wall, as firmly as she could in her right hand—the letter Y—and plunged into straight into his right eye.

He screamed as blood leaked from his eye socket.

And then a gunshot sounded from somewhere in the house.

And all the prisoners started screaming.

CHAPTER61

NOW THAT BATISE had been escorted from the prison tower, they’d moved their group inside Warden Wren’s office, as witnesses to the execution that was apparently going to take place despite the President’s command.

Jennifer and Sam stood side by side at the window overlooking the yard. Down below, Warden Wren, along with a news camera crew, stood with dozens of prison guards, four of whom stood out from the rest as the assumed group who’d either volunteered for, or had been chosen as, the designated firing squad in Batise’s execution.

Sam remembered Batise’s last words to him, to stay away from the window, and that message, coupled with the bizarre scene emerging below, sent a wave of foreboding dread through him.