Chapter 5 - The Faint Cry
Scratch.
The sound was impossibly tiny. It was the faint, muffled sound of a fingernail scraping weakly against the interior silk lining of the coffin lid.
Eleanor completely froze. The blood drained entirely from her face.
Whimper.
It wasn't a trick of the acoustics. It wasn't the wood settling. It was a weak, breathless, undeniably human sound coming directly from the absolute darkness inside the white box.
Lily gasped, her eyes widening in sheer, vindicated relief. "I told you! I told you!"
David’s angry, arrogant expression violently collapsed in a fraction of a second. His eyes widened in absolute, unfiltered terror. His face turned the color of ash. He stared at the jagged hole in the wood, his chest completely stopping.
Did you hear that? David thought, panic completely hijacking his nervous system.
It was mathematically impossible. The synthetic paralytic neurotoxin he had slipped into Emma’s nightly tea was supposed to last for seventy-two hours. It was designed to completely suppress her heart rate and breathing to undetectable levels, mimicking a massive cardiac arrest perfectly. By the time the drug wore off, Emma was supposed to be nothing but a pile of ashes in the crematorium, leaving David as the sole inheritor of her massive fortune.
But David had miscalculated the dosage. Emma’s metabolism had burned through the poison twelve hours too early.
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"Close it!" David shrieked, completely losing his mind. He lunged toward the coffin, desperately trying to throw his own suit jacket over the jagged hole to block the air. "It's escaping gases! It's a post-mortem spasm! Get the incinerator ready now!"
👉 David was fully prepared to burn his wife alive in front of her mother, but Eleanor was about to unleash her wrath.
