Chapter 13 - The Intrusion in the Dark
"Shut the lights!" Daniel hissed, instantly clicking his flashlight off and pulling me down behind the heavy mahogany vanity. Julian killed his beam a second later, plunging the bedroom into pitch blackness.
The only illumination came from the sickly grey river fog filtering through the drawn lace curtains.
Downstairs, coarse voices cut through the quiet house.
"Clear the foyer! Check the breaker box in the pantry, but don't waste time on the lights—we’re running on battery power."
"Did you see the tire tracks outside?" another voice snapped, rough and aggressive. "Someone’s already here. If it’s the Vance kid or the daughter, Sterling’s instructions were crystal clear: nobody walks out of this house with the archive."
My heart pounded furiously against my ribs. Julian leaned close to my ear, his breath hot and steady. "Ironclad Holdings. They bypassed Marcus’s perimeter patrol on the lower bluff road."
"How many?" Daniel whispered, his hand sliding inside his heavy leather coat to grip the handle of the licensed Kimber .45 ACP pistol he had carried since Brooke’s first threats began.
"Sounds like three, maybe four," Julian replied, his voice calm, calculating, and chillingly precise. "Marcus was supposed to arrive with backup in twenty minutes. We can't let them pin us down in this room. The east wing has a back service staircase that leads directly down to the cellar."
"The cellar?" I whispered. "Evelyn said the secret was beneath the foundation."
"The foundation is beneath the sub-cellar under the old carriage house," I remembered with sudden, vivid clarity. "When I was seven, Grandmother Evelyn forbade Brooke and me from ever opening the storm cellar behind the pantry. She said the stone vault down there was built before the Civil War."
Heavy boots began ascending the grand staircase. Their high-powered tactical beams swept through the cracked open doorway of the east hall, casting long, menacing shadows across the ceiling above us.
"We move now," Daniel decided. He rose in a low crouch, checking the hallway through the hinge gap of the bedroom door. "Vanessa, stay between us. Julian, cover our rear."
Daniel eased the bedroom’s private dressing room door open. It connected directly to a narrow servant corridor lined with bare wood and copper pipe conduits. The air was frigid here, smelling faintly of damp brick and old iron.
We moved like shadows down the narrow hallway. Behind us, the shattering of Evelyn’s bedroom door splintered through the hall.
"They were in here!" a man roared from the master suite. "The music box is open! The key is gone! Search the rooms! Cut off the exits!"
"Hurry," Daniel urged, guiding me down the spiral service steps.
We descended two full stories, bypassing the ground-floor pantry, until the wood beneath our feet turned to cold, damp limestone. The air grew heavy with the mineral scent of wet earth and ancient masonry. We had reached the sub-cellar.
Daniel clicked on his flashlight, shielding the lens with his fingers so that only a thin slit of amber light escaped.
The room was vast, supported by massive arches of rough-hewn granite. Giant oak wine barrels, rotted with age, stood lined against the western wall. At the far eastern end of the foundation wall stood a massive, iron-reinforced oak bulkhead door, held shut not by a padlock, but by a brass mortise mechanism bearing the exact same falcon-and-scale crest as the key in my pocket.
"The vault," I gasped softly.
"Look at the lock," Julian pointed out, illuminating the mechanism.
Surrounding the brass keyway were three rotating brass tumblers, each engraved with numbers from 0 to 9.
"0-7-4," Daniel whispered, reciting the numbers engraved on the key.
I stepped forward, my hands trembling as I dialed the first tumbler to 0, the second to 7, and the third to 4. Then, I slid the heavy brass key into the central slot and turned it clockwise.
May you like
A deep, echoing metallic clunk resonated from deep inside the stone wall.
***