Chapter 7 - The Subterranean Vault
Dante clicked the radio microphone on Marcus’s vest. ""Julian. When I find you, a bullet will be the kindest thing you receive.""
He crushed the radio under the heel of his boot and moved.
He didn't take the main stairs. The entire upper house was compromised. Dante navigated the dark corridors like a phantom, knowing every hidden hinge and structural anomaly of the century-old manor. In the storage room behind the kitchen pantry, behind a wall of vintage wine racks, lay the entrance to the subterranean drainage tunnels—an escape route Dante had built five years ago during the syndicate wars.
He carried Clara down the spiral iron steps into the cold, damp dark beneath the estate. The smell of wet limestone and rusted iron enveloped them. Down here, the distant echoes of gunshots and breaking glass were muffled into dull thumps.
""Where are we going?"" Clara whispered weakly, her head resting against his neck. The adrenaline had stabilized her heart rate, but the poison was still circulating. She needed a comprehensive medical wash within two hours, or her kidneys would shut down completely.
""To the docks,"" Dante said gently, pacing his long strides through the knee-deep emergency drainage channel. ""There is a safehouse near the water. A doctor is waiting there.""
""Is Atlas coming?""
Dante tightened his grip on her, feeling a knot tighten in his throat. ""Atlas held the line for us, Clara. He did his job.""
They reached the heavy iron bulkhead that led out to the canal outlet behind the property. Dante keyed the digital padlock with his thumbprint. The heavy hydraulics hissed open, revealing the concrete slipway where a reinforced, blacked-out tender boat was moored.
Dante stepped onto the concrete dock and froze.
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Sitting on an upturned fuel drum beneath the yellow safety lantern, an unlit cigarette resting between her lips and a suppressed pistol resting across her knees, was a woman with sharp cheekbones and long auburn hair.
It was Evelyn Vance. Clara’s mother—the woman Dante had buried in an empty grave three years ago.
