Chapter 6 - Beneath the Floorboards
The old wine cellar beneath the estate was a place even Sawyer’s guards rarely visited.
According to the blueprints we had pulled up on the surviving security monitors, it was built during the Prohibition era—a labyrinth of thick stone walls, vaulted brick ceilings, and hidden tunnels leading down toward the rocky coastline.
With Lily holding tightly to the hem of my jacket and the white pit bull padding silently ahead like a loyal, four-legged guardian, we descended the spiral stone staircase into the damp, freezing dark.
My flashlight beam cut through the heavy, stagnant air, illuminating endless rows of empty wine racks covered in thick layers of dust and spiderwebs.
"Are you sure, Lily?" I whispered, shining the light down a narrow, unpaved side tunnel where the stonework gave way to raw earth.
The little girl didn't speak. She simply pointed down the dark tunnel, her small chin set with a fierce, unbreakable determination that reminded me so much of her father it hurt.
We walked for a hundred yards beneath the foundations of the mansion until the tunnel ended abruptly in front of a heavy, iron-reinforced oak door.
A door painted a deep, peeling shade of crimson red.
The red door.
The one Sawyer had claimed didn't exist anymore.
I reached out, my hand trembling, and pushed against the heavy wood. It wasn't locked. With a hollow, echoing groan, the red door swung inward, revealing a subterranean chamber that smelled of damp stone, old paper, and iron.
My flashlight beam swept across the room—and stopped dead.
It wasn't a torture chamber. It was an archive.
Floor-to-ceiling metal shelving units lined the underground vault, packed tight with thousands of manila folders, ledgers, and digital hard drives. And tied to a heavy wooden chair in the center of the room, bleeding heavily from a head wound, was Sawyer Voss.
"Sawyer!" I gasped, dropping my bag and running toward him.
His head rolled back, his eyes fluttering open slowly. The golden-brown irises were clouded with pain, a deep gash splitting his forehead, but when he saw me—and more importantly, when he saw Lily standing safely in the doorway behind me—a fierce, desperate relief washed over his battered face.
"You... shouldn't have come down here," he wheezed, coughing up a drop of blood. "Vance... it's a trap—"
"The trap is spring-loaded, old friend," a smooth, cultured voice echoed from the dark shadows behind the metal shelving units.
I spun around, my hands flying up defensively.
Stepping out from the gloom came Victor Vance.
He was impeccably dressed in a charcoal three-piece suit, not a single hair out of place, holding a silenced automatic pistol pointed straight at my chest. Behind him stood two bruised mercenaries holding heavy submachine guns.
"Maya, right?" Vance smiled, his eyes cold and dead behind expensive designer frames. "The dedicated animal doctor. It’s fascinating how people who have nothing to do with this world always manage to stick their noses into the gears until they get crushed."
Sawyer strained against the heavy ropes binding him to the chair, the muscles in his neck bulging with suppressed fury. "Let her go, Victor. This is between you and me. You wanted the syndicate? You have it. Let my daughter and her leave."
"Oh, Sawyer, you always were a sentimental romantic," Vance chuckled, taking a slow step forward, the suppressor of his pistol gleaming in the flashlight beam. "Elena was the same way. Always thinking love and family could conquer empires. Do you know what she said to me the night she found these ledgers?"
Victor gestured broadly to the shelves of financial records surrounding us.
"She begged me to let her take Lily and run," Vance continued, his voice dripping with casual cruelty. "She said she didn't care about the money, the ports, or the blood. But she saw too much. And just like her mother, your little girl here is about to get a front-row seat to how real empires are cleaned up."
Vance raised the barrel of his pistol, aiming it squarely at my forehead.
Time seemed to slow down to a crawl. I could hear my own pulse thumping in my ears, the steady, rhythmic dripping of water in the corner, and the heavy breathing of Sawyer straining against his bonds.
I looked back at Lily.
May you like
She wasn't crying. She wasn't hiding.
She was looking down at the white pit bull standing beside her. The dog wasn't growling anymore. He was staring straight at Victor Vance with dead, focused eyes—the eyes of an animal that had been hunted, cornered, and left for dead... and had finally found the hunter.
