Chapter 3 - The Woman in the Steel Room
Evelyn forgot fear for exactly three seconds.
That was all the time it took for her to cross the storage room and press both hands against the steel door.
“Who’s in there?”
Silence.
Then a woman’s voice answered, so weak it seemed to scrape through the metal.
“Rosa?”
Evelyn’s throat tightened.
“No. My name is Evelyn. I work in the house.”
A small, broken sound came from the other side. It might have been relief. It might have been disappointment.
“Did he send you?”
“Who?”
No answer.
Titan pushed his nose against the bottom of the door and inhaled. His body changed. Not aggression. Recognition.
Evelyn looked at the lock. Heavy. Modern. Electronic keypad above it. Not something a forgotten tunnel would have.
Someone used this place.
Recently.
“Can you move away from the door?” Evelyn asked.
“I can’t.”
Those two words hollowed the room.
Evelyn looked around, frantic. There were crates, trunks, old tools, a rusted shovel, broken chair legs, three empty gasoline cans, and the pronged collar she could not make herself look at again.
No key.
No code.
The woman inside coughed.
“Please,” she whispered. “If Victor finds you here—”
A thunderous sound exploded from the tunnel behind them.
Evelyn turned.
Titan lunged toward the passage, placing himself between her and the stairs.
Footsteps.
Fast.
More than one person.
Evelyn grabbed the lamp and lowered the flame until the room dimmed.
“Evelyn?” Gabriel’s voice called from the tunnel.
Her knees nearly gave out.
“Here!”
Gabriel entered the storage room with a pistol in his hand and snow still melting on his coat. Two men followed him, neither of them Victor. One was older, silver-haired, with a doctor’s bag. The other looked like security and moved with the controlled urgency of someone who had seen too many locked rooms.
Gabriel’s gaze swept across the chain, the collar, the carved dates, Evelyn’s pale face, and finally Titan.
His expression did not change.
That was the frightening part.
Only his eyes did.
They went dead cold.
“Who is behind that door?” Evelyn asked.
Gabriel did not answer.
The woman inside heard him.
A sound came through the metal.
Not words at first.
A sob.
Then, “Gabe?”
Evelyn turned slowly.
Gabriel froze.
For one terrible second, the entire room seemed to stop around him.
Then he crossed the floor and placed one hand flat against the steel door.
“Marisa?”
The name left him like something torn from a wound.
The woman on the other side broke.
“I knew Titan would find you,” she sobbed. “I knew he would.”
Evelyn looked from the door to Gabriel.
Marisa.
The name meant something. She had heard it once in the kitchen, whispered by two older maids who stopped speaking when Vanessa entered.
Gabriel’s sister.
Dead, they had said.
Killed in a car accident six years earlier.
Gabriel lowered the gun.
“Open it,” he said.
The security man moved to the keypad. “We need the code.”
Gabriel looked at the doctor. “Move back.”
The security man understood before Evelyn did. He pulled Evelyn away from the door. Gabriel raised the gun and fired three controlled shots into the lock mechanism.
The sound in the enclosed room was unbearable.
Evelyn covered her ears. Titan did not move.
The security man kicked the door once.
Twice.
On the third kick, it burst inward.
The woman inside flinched from the light.
She was sitting on a mattress on the floor, one wrist bound to a pipe with a padded medical restraint. Her dark hair hung in tangled ropes around a face so thin Evelyn could see the bones. She wore a gray sweater and black leggings. Her lips were cracked. One cheek was bruised yellow at the edge.
But her eyes were Gabriel’s.
The same black, burning eyes.
Gabriel stepped into the room and stopped as if crossing that threshold cost him something physical.
Marisa Romano looked up at him.
Neither spoke.
Then Titan moved past Gabriel and pressed his enormous head into Marisa’s chest.
She wrapped her free arm around the dog and began to cry into his wet fur.
Gabriel turned away for half a second.
Only half.
But Evelyn saw it.
The man who ruled the house had just discovered he had been living above his buried sister for years.
The doctor knelt beside Marisa. “I’m Dr. Bell. I need to check you.”
Marisa shook her head violently. “No hospital.”
“Marisa,” Gabriel said, voice raw.
“No hospital,” she repeated. “They have people there.”
Gabriel’s jaw tightened. “Who?”
She looked at Evelyn.
Not Gabriel.
Evelyn felt the weight of that look like a hand around her throat.
“Victor,” Marisa whispered. “Vanessa. Calvin. And others.”
Gabriel did not blink.
“How long?”
Marisa’s mouth trembled.
“Not six years.”
Gabriel’s fingers curled slowly at his sides.
“How long, Marisa?”
She looked down at Titan.
“Three hundred and twelve days in this room.”
Evelyn covered her mouth.
Gabriel turned his face toward the carved marks on the wall.
The dates.
Seven months of marks.
Not all of them.
Not nearly all.
“Before that?” he asked.
Marisa closed her eyes. “The east medical suite. Then Chicago. Then here whenever Vanessa visited. They moved me when you started asking questions.”
Gabriel looked at the steel door, the keypad, the restraint, the mattress.
“You were in my house.”
“Yes.”
“And Victor told me you were dead.”
“No,” Marisa whispered. “Victor helped them prove I was dead.”
The doctor cut the restraint.
Marisa cried out as circulation returned to her hand. Gabriel stepped forward, but she recoiled before she could stop herself.
The movement struck him harder than a slap.
Marisa saw it and broke again.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know it’s you. I know.”
Gabriel lowered himself to the floor in front of her.
“I am the one who is sorry.”
Evelyn looked away. The moment felt too private.
But Marisa’s eyes found her again.
“You opened the wall?”
Evelyn nodded.
“Titan showed me.”
Marisa tried to smile. “He always liked women who listened.”
Gabriel turned toward Evelyn then.
For the first time, Evelyn saw not power, not suspicion, not command.
Gratitude.
And something else.
Something like fear that if he looked away, this fragile miracle would vanish.
Above them, faintly, came the sound of a door slamming.
The security man looked toward the tunnel.
Gabriel rose at once.
“Who knows this passage?”
Marisa’s face drained of color.
“Victor.”
Another sound echoed down the stairs.
A man’s voice.
Calvin Pike shouted, “They’re down here!”
Gabriel lifted his gun.
Evelyn grabbed Marisa’s free hand.
May you like
Titan moved to the doorway, his teeth bared.
Then the lights in the tunnel went out.
