Chapter 6 - The Cleaner’s Oath
Clara pulled Helena backward with brutal precision, using her momentum to drive Helena’s head against an oak wine barrel. The revolver clattered to the stone floor, and Helena slumped unconscious into the dust.
Clara leaned against the barrel, breathing heavily. A crimson stain bloomed across the left shoulder of her sky-blue uniform, but her grip on her sidearm never wavered.
"Are you hit badly?" Victor asked, stepping over Helena’s motionless body and picking up the fallen revolver.
"Through-and-through. Shoulder muscle only," Clara grunted, pressing a wad of gauze from her apron pocket against the wound. "We have four minutes before the perimeter sweep team breaches the basement. The estate is surrounded."
Victor ushered Julian through the vault door into the bomb shelter, where emergency rations, satellite phones, and clean identities had been stored for emergencies. "How long have you worked for Sarah?" he asked, referring to his late wife who had passed away from suspected heart failure three years ago.
Clara looked at him with an expression of weary pity. "Since the day she discovered she was being poisoned, Mr. Sterling. She knew she wouldn't survive to raise Julian, and she knew the poison was coming from inside this household."
The realization struck Victor like a physical blow. Sarah hadn't suffered from an undiagnosed cardiac anomaly. She had been assassinated. "Helena?" he asked, his voice shaking.
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"Helena was just the executioner," Clara said, checking the ammunition in her magazine. "The orders came from your own boardroom. We need to leave through the stormwater drainage tunnel behind that blast door right now."
Just then, the cellar ceiling trembled violently as an explosion roared from above, sending plumes of dust through the ventilation grates.
