The Red Hallway
Chapter 04 - The Red Hallway
The first shot came from the east garden.
Not loud. Not wild. Suppressed.
A professional sound.
Dante moved before Clara could scream. He crossed the infirmary, locked the adjoining door where Lily sat with Mrs. Bell, and turned to the guard stationed outside.
“No one enters this room unless I say it with my own mouth.”
The guard nodded.
Clara pushed herself upright despite the IV in her arm. “You have to let me take her.”
“And go where?”
“Away from here.”
“This is away.”
“This is the center of it.”
Dante turned at the door. “Then I will make the center hold.”
He stepped into the hallway.
The mansion’s emergency lights had painted everything red. Marble floors, gilt mirrors, white roses in black vases. The corridor looked less like a home than a church after a massacre.
Marco came fast from the stairs with two men behind him.
“Three vehicles through the service gate,” he said. “Codes belonged to Mrs. Vale.”
“Where is she?”
“Gone.”
Dante’s face did not change.
Marco continued, faster now. “Holding room empty. Guard unconscious. No blood. She had help inside.”
“Of course she did.”
Another burst of gunfire snapped from below.
Dante took the pistol Marco offered and checked it with the absent efficiency of a man who had done so too often.
“Seal the west wing. Move staff into the ballroom. No one near the servants’ corridor.”
“What about Clara and the girl?”
“With me.”
Marco stared. “Boss—”
“They came for them. Which means wherever they are, the fight goes there.”
Five minutes later, Clara was in a wheelchair she refused to need, Lily was on her lap holding Bunny, and Dante was guiding them through a passage hidden behind the library shelves.
Lily looked around with sleepy fear.
“Is this a secret tunnel?”
Dante glanced back. “Yes.”
“Does Mommy know?”
“No.”
Lily considered this. “Mommy knows lots of things.”
“I am learning that.”
Clara’s hand tightened around her daughter.
The passage smelled of dust and old wood. It had been built by Dante’s grandfather during Prohibition and modernized by Dante’s father during a war that never appeared in history books. Only five people alive knew where it began.
Apparently, Dante thought grimly, that number had become six.
They reached the old chapel beneath the north wing. It was small, windowless, lined with saints whose painted eyes had watched generations of Romanos lie, pray, and bleed.
Dante helped Clara onto a wooden bench. Lily curled against her.
“I want to go back to our room,” Lily whispered.
Clara kissed her hair. “I know, baby.”
Dante looked at the child. “You are safer here.”
“Is the bad man coming?”
“No.”
Clara looked at him.
Dante held the child’s gaze. “He may try. That is different.”
Lily nodded, accepting the logic of violence more easily than any child should.
Marco entered through the passage, breathing hard. “We contained two vehicles. Third disappeared on the south road. Enzo wasn’t in the house.”
“He never intended to be.”
“No. This was extraction. Or distraction.”
Dante turned toward Clara. “What does Enzo want?”
“The ledger.”
“You said you don’t have it.”
“I don’t.”
“Then what does he think you have?”
Clara looked down at Lily.
Dante’s stomach hardened.
“No.”
Clara closed her eyes.
“Lorenzo said the ledger was locked in three parts. He had one. Your father had one. And the third…”
Dante waited.
Clara whispered, “Was hidden in something no one would throw away.”
Lily lifted Bunny.
Dante stared at the bear.
“We already found the memory card.”
Clara shook her head. “That was Lorenzo’s message. Not the ledger.”
Marco swore.
Lily frowned. “Bunny has a secret?”
Dante crouched carefully. “May I look again?”
Lily held the bear against her chest. For a long moment, she looked like any small child asked to surrender the only thing that still belonged to her.
Then she handed Bunny to him.
This time Dante did not search the seam. He looked at the stitched black eye. The thread was newer, Clara had said nothing because perhaps Clara had never known. He turned it under the chapel lamp and saw the nearly invisible edge of a tiny metal casing beneath the button.
Marco brought a blade.
Dante removed the eye.
Inside was a micro key no bigger than a grain of rice.
Lily began to cry silently.
Clara reached for the bear. “You broke him.”
Dante placed the button back in his palm with unexpected gentleness. “I’ll have him repaired.”
“That’s what grown-ups say when they can’t fix things,” Lily said.
The chapel went still.
Dante looked at her, and for one brief instant the feared head of the Romano family looked like a man struck in the heart by a child’s ordinary truth.
“You are right,” he said. “So I will say this instead. I will sit here until someone fixes him in front of you.”
Lily sniffed. “With strong thread?”
“With the strongest.”
Marco’s phone vibrated.
He checked the screen and went pale.
“What?” Dante asked.
Marco turned the phone toward him.
A live video feed showed Mrs. Vale standing beside Enzo Romano in a dark room. In front of them, bound to a chair, was Dr. Bell.
Enzo smiled into the camera.
“Nephew,” he said. “You found the child. Good. Now bring me the key, or the doctor who saved Clara dies first.”
May you like
Lily looked up from her broken bear.
And Clara whispered, “He knows where we are.”
