Chapter 4 - SECRETS IN THE DRAFT
The air on the second-floor landing was thick with the scent of dried lavender and decades of trapped soot. The four of them crouched low behind a carved mahogany linen chest, listening to the agonizingly slow squeak of the stairs below. Victor Kane was not rushing. He knew every step on the main staircase; he was deliberately stepping on the outer edges of the risers, where the wood was anchored to the wall studs, keeping his approach almost noiseless.
Ethan leaned into Sarah’s ear. “Julian’s study is at the end of the hall. It has a bolt from the inside.”
“A interior lock won’t stop a hollow-point bullet through an antique pine door,” Sarah hissed back. “We need a way down, not a dead end.”
“The dumbwaiter,” Emma murmured, her voice flat, cool, and calculating. Her analytical mind was working like an engine in overdrive. “I saw the brass doors in the wall outside the linen press. This was a four-story estate built before electrification. There has to be a counterweighted service lift connecting the master suites to the kitchen and the cellar below.”
“It’s fifty years old, Emma,” Lily whispered, horrified. “The ropes will snap.”
“The ropes are steel-braided aircraft cable,” Ethan said, his voice regaining an edge of command. “Julian renovated the service lifts in the nineties when he used this place for his private meetings. But the car only holds one person at a time.”
A floorboard creaked loudly on the landing.
Victor had reached the top of the stairs.
“Mr. Reynolds?” Victor’s voice drifted down the carpeted hall. It was rich, deep, and unnervingly calm, the voice of a man conducting a routine business inventory. “Ethan, there’s no need to play games in the dark. I know you’re out of the attic. I saw the latch was pried off. You should have stayed put. It would have been peaceful. A little dehydration, you slip into a coma, you wake up somewhere better.”
Ethan’s jaw clenched. He reached down and picked up a heavy, bronze-plated candelabra from the side table next to the chest.
Victor took another step forward. The faint click of his weapon’s safety disengaging echoed off the plaster walls like a dry twig snapping in winter. “Whoever is with you… you’re just dragging them into a Reynolds family dispute. You always were selfish, Ethan. Even when you were sixteen, crying in the basement of the textile mill. My father had to listen to you scream for three days. You think you’re better than us because your name is on the letterhead? Julian gave thirty years of his life keeping that family empire from crumbling while you traveled Europe playing the sensitive artist.”
Lily met Emma’s eyes. In the darkness, the twins communicated without words. Emma pointed toward the brass hatch of the dumbwaiter ten feet down the corridor, then pointed toward the open door of the master bedroom directly opposite them.
Lily nodded once.
Lily slipped her heavy SLR camera strap over her head, gripping the body of the camera in her right palm. She reached into her coat pocket, retrieved a small aluminum LED tactical light she used for macro photography, and placed it on the floorboards. She slid it with a gentle push down the hallway toward the master bedroom.
The small metallic tube rolled three feet and clicked softly against a floor grate.
Instantly, Victor Kane’s shadow lengthened across the wall as he pivoted toward the sound, his gun raised in a two-handed combat stance. He moved with lethal efficiency, crossing the hall toward the bedroom door.
“Now,” Emma breathed.
Ethan lunged forward. Despite three days of starvation, his six-foot frame carried the momentum of raw survival. He rounded the carved linen chest and swung the heavy bronze candelabra with both hands, aiming not for Kane’s head, but for his extended right wrist.
The bronze collided with the gun hand with a sickening crunch.
The pistol discharged into the ceiling—a deafening, thunderous crack that shook plaster dust from the rafters like snow. The bullet ripped through the lathe and plaster above them, showering the hallway in white powder. The gun flew from Kane’s grip, clattering across the floor and tumbling through the balusters, dropping eighteen feet down into the foyer below.
Kane didn’t scream. He grunted, stumbling back, his left fist coming around in a savage, vicious arc that caught Ethan across the temple.
Ethan dropped to his knees, his vision going gray.
“Run!” Ethan roared, spitting blood onto the runner. “Get down the shaft!”
Kane reached for his belt, where a six-inch combat knife cleared its sheath with a metallic hiss. But before he could drive it downward toward Ethan’s neck, Sarah Carter stepped into the corridor, holding a three-foot length of heavy iron fireplace poker she had snatched from the hall hearth.
She swung it with the full weight of twenty years of buried rage, catching Kane squarely across his ribs.
Kane wheezed, stumbling into the doorframe of the study. The blow bought them three seconds.
Emma yanked the brass hatch of the dumbwaiter open. The interior of the wooden car was lined with zinc, roughly three feet tall and two feet wide. A thick braided steel cable vanished into the darkness above.
“Lily, get in!” Emma shouted.
“No, you and Aunt Sarah—”
“Lily, you have the phone with the recording and the camera cards!” Emma yelled, shoving her sister toward the narrow zinc box. “If Victor kills Ethan, you are the only one with physical proof that Ethan was alive inside this house today! Get down to the cellar, unlock the storm doors, and get outside!”
Lily stared into her sister’s determined eyes. She knew Emma was right. In an inheritance dispute involving hundreds of millions of dollars, the law didn't care about what people whispered—it cared about admissible, incontrovertible evidence.
Lily scrambled into the dumbwaiter, tucking her knees to her chest.
“Release the hand brake on the wall!” Ethan choked out from the floor, struggling back to his feet as Kane recovered his footing in the study doorway, his face twisted in murderous rage.
Emma slammed the brass hatch shut.
May you like
Lily heard the heavy clunk of the brake release outside.
Then the floor dropped out from beneath her stomach.
