💥 The House of Shattered Glass — Murder in the Snow (Chapter 12 Free)

 The lights are on. The room is wrecked. And the world ends with a single hole in the center of a father’s forehead. Chapter 12 is the moment Pulse turns from tension to trauma.

Olivia’s scream, the fleeing shadow, the shot fired into winter-dark woods—it’s visceral, immediate, unforgettable. This is the chapter that grips readers by the throat and doesn’t let go.

👇 Read Chapter 12

TWELVE

Streeter Residence, Traverse City, Michigan

            Liv maneuvered the BMW back into the garage, an eerie feeling of déjà vu engulfing her as the garage door closed behind her. Her headlights dimmed, casting the space into a gloom momentarily banished by the overhead fluorescent lights. The snow had picked up its pace since she left the pharmacy, the weather advisories on her phone warning of increasingly dangerous conditions on the road.

"Dad?" Liv called out, her voice slicing through the silence as she entered the kitchen. The only reply was the mechanical hum of the furnace, an electrical warrior against the encroaching cold. Liv's eyes fell on the white paper pharmacy bag in her hand, its ordinariness a stark contrast to the growing tension knotting her stomach.

Moving into the living room, her foot froze mid-step, her heart seizing in an instant.

Chaos.

Chairs upturned, tables toppled, vases shattered, and blood—blood smeared and splattered like a grotesque canvas. Her mind screamed.

"Dad!" she yelled, her voice splintering in the empty space. Her pulse quickened, adrenaline replacing oxygen in her veins. Had he fallen? Was it a medical emergency? What the hell happened here?

Liv ascended the stairs cautiously, her eyes following a macabre breadcrumb trail of deep red droplets. Her hand touched the doorknob of her father's bedroom, trembling. She pushed the door open.

Blake Streeter lay slumped against the wall, his eyes vacant. In the center of his forehead was a single, grim bullet hole.

Liv's scream tore through the house, shattering the silence like glass.

A door slammed downstairs.

Instincts honed through years of training and the immediate terror of the moment took over. Liv bolted to her old room, her hand automatically reaching for a long-abandoned .22 rifle, and a magazine tucked beside it. She loaded it with a shaky but swift motion.

Back in her father's room, Liv ripped aside the curtain and peered out. A figure—slim, indistinct—was sprinting toward the cover of the nearby woods. With a near mechanical movement, she slid the window open, shouldered the rifle, and fired. Bark exploded off a tree trunk, inches from the fleeing intruder's head. The figure vanished into the darkness of the woods, swallowed whole by the night.

Her attention snapped back to her father's lifeless form, and a scream of pure anguish clawed its way out of her throat. Her fingers trembled as they touched the screen of her phone to dial 911.

"Police... my father... shot..."

The seconds that followed stretched into unbearable eons, each tick of the clock a heavy stone sinking into her chest. Finally, the crunching of tires on snow signaled the arrival of law enforcement. The sheriff's car skidded into the driveway, its blue and red lights splashing color onto the monochrome landscape. A deputy leapt from the car, gun drawn, sprinting toward the Streeter home's front door.

As he crossed the threshold, Liv was struck by the sudden, horrible realization that life, as she knew it, had irrevocably changed.

📘 Continue now: Get Pulse on Amazon