Chapter 10 - Fire and Blood
“The tunnels,” I said instantly, the fog of fear burning away, replaced by the sheer survival instinct that had kept me alive through months of secret rehabilitation.
“What tunnels?” Vance asked, picking his gun back up and reloading the chamber with a crisp snap.
“My father was a paranoid man during the Cold War expansions,” I said, pointing toward the false back of the walk-in humidor beside the bookshelf. “There is an underground service line running from the wine cellar directly to the old carriage house across the ridge. It exits onto the state highway half a mile away.”
Heavy boots stomped up the grand oak staircase.
“Willa, you can’t walk half a mile through an unpaved tunnel,” Elena cried, clutching my hand. “Your legs—”
“I spent fourteen months pretending to be a cripple while my husband paraded his mistress through my home,” I snarled, gripping the edges of the desk and pulling myself upright on my own two feet. The pain in my hips was white-hot, but the fire in my blood was hotter. “I didn't survive a hundred-foot plunge off a cliff just to be executed in my father’s library.”
I grabbed the red ledger and the external hard drive, shoving them into Elena’s backpack.
Vance pushed the humidor aside, revealing the hidden steel doorway. He pulled it open, exposing a dark, damp concrete stairway plunging into the earth.
*BANG.*
A bullet blew the brass lock off the library doors.
The heavy wood swung inward. A man in tactical armor raised a suppressed submachine gun, but Vance was faster—two deafening shots echoed in the enclosed library, dropping the intruder instantly.
“Go! Down! Now!” Vance yelled, shoving Elena and me into the dark stairwell.
We descended into the pitch black as more gunfire chewed through the mahogany walls behind us. Every step down the concrete stairs sent lightning bolts of agony through my knees, but I didn't stop. I couldn't stop.
Ten minutes later, battered, freezing, and gasping for breath, we pushed through the storm cellar doors of the abandoned carriage house. Outside, the winter rain was falling in sheets, washing away the blood that had dripped from my reopened ankle abrasions.
Parked beneath the rusted tin roof of the carriage house sat my father’s vintage 1978 Land Cruiser—dusty, untouched for years, but maintained meticulously by our loyal groundskeeper before he passed.
Vance hot-wired the ignition. The old V8 engine roared to life with a ferocious growl, its mechanical simplicity immune to any digital kill-switches.
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We smashed through the rotting wooden gates of the carriage house, fishtailing onto the wet asphalt of Route 9 just as the Westchester manor behind us erupted into a massive ball of orange flame, incinerating the history, the lies, and the ghosts of my past.
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