Chapter 8 - The Winter Garden Breakout
The back corridor leading to the glass conservatory was freezing cold. The snow was blowing sideways against the outer glass walls, creating a blinding curtain of white that obscured the gardens outside.
I led the four boys down the corridor, keeping them low beneath the window line.
When we reached the padlocked double doors at the end of the glass hallway, I pulled out my lockpicking tools.
"Caleb, watch the hall behind us," I instructed, my hands trembling as I inserted the tension wrench into the heavy brass padlock securing the chain. "Tell me the second you see anyone coming."
"They're coming," Caleb said two seconds later, his voice a terrified squeak.
I glanced over my shoulder.
At the far end of the long glass hallway, one of Vance’s security guards was running toward us, his tactical boots thudding heavily against the floor runners. He had a radio in one hand and a taser drawn in the other.
"Halt! Stop right there!" the guard shouted.
"Nia!" Luke screamed, hiding behind Evan's coat.
Focus, Nia. Focus.
I inserted the paperclip hook into the lock, feeling for the high pins inside the brass cylinder.
Pin one... pin two... push... pin three...
CLICK.
The heavy brass padlock popped open in my hand.
I grabbed the iron chain, yanked it free from the door handles, and threw the double glass doors open into the howling winter storm outside.
"GO! GO!" I shouted, shoving Evan and Caleb through the door into the snow, followed by Noah and Luke.
I stepped through last, grabbed the heavy iron doors, swung them shut behind us, and jammed the heavy iron chain through the exterior door handles, sliding the padlock back through the links and snapping it shut from the outside.
Locked from the outside.
Through the frost-coated glass, I saw the security guard slam his body against the doors, his face contorted in anger as he realized he was trapped inside the corridor, unable to open the doors without the key. He raised his radio, screaming into the handset as he began battering the heavy glass with his tactical flashlight.
"This way!" I shouted over the roar of the wind, taking Luke’s hand and leading the four boys through the deep, knee-high snowdrifts toward the ruined Victorian conservatory.
The wind was vicious, carrying icy needles of snow that stung our faces. Noah stumbled in a drift, but Evan caught him by the back of his coat, hauling his little brother up and keeping him moving forward.
We reached the outer glass wall of the grand conservatory dome.
The old glass house stood like a giant, frozen ribcage against the white sky. Inside, the dead vines and empty wooden tables were covered in a layer of drifted snow that had filtered through cracked overhead panes over years of neglect.
"Where do we go?" Caleb shouted over the wind, his teeth chattering uncontrollably. "There's nowhere to hide out here!"
"There!" I pointed toward the far eastern side of the conservatory, where an old brick boiler house was attached to the iron structure.
During my search of Adrian Vale’s financial property land records the night before, I had noticed an old architectural map of the estate from 1920. The boiler house was built over an ancient drainage culvert that ran under the estate’s outer security fence, emptying into a public creek bed four hundred yards away near the main road.
We scrambled through a broken glass panel into the interior of the upper conservatory, our boots crunching on fallen glass and frozen soil.
The air inside the upper greenhouse was slightly sheltered from the biting wind, but it was eerily cold.
As we sprinted down the central gravel aisle between the dead growing benches, a dark silhouette stepped out from the storm doors at the far end of the dome.
It was Vance.
His tactical coat was torn at the shoulder, blood dripping from a cut on his cheek where Adrian had struck him. He carried his suppressed weapon in his right hand, his face twisted into a grotesque, murderous mask.
"You're not taking Eleanor's work, girl," Vance growled, his voice carrying over the whistling wind filtering through the shattered glass dome above. "And you're not taking the boys."
I stopped dead in my tracks, pulling all four boys behind my back, positioning myself between them and the barrel of his gun.
"It's over, Vance," I said, holding Eleanor Vale’s leather notebook high in my right hand where he could clearly see it against the snow background. "The research notes are right here. If you shoot me, you'll have to find them in three feet of snow after I drop them through the iron grate into the drainage canal below."
Vance stopped ten feet away, his gun leveling directly at my chest.
"Hand over the book, Nia," Vance sneered. "And maybe I let you walk out of these woods alive."
"Don't do it, Nia!" Evan shouted from behind me, holding a heavy piece of broken glass he had picked up off the ground.
Suddenly, a massive, deafening crash echoed through the glass house.
The wooden interior access doors connecting the subterranean stairwell to the upper greenhouse exploded outward in a shower of splintered oak and iron hardware.
Adrian Vale burst into the greenhouse, his face covered in cuts, his suit coat soaked in mud and oil from the cellar. In his hand, he held a heavy iron fireplace poker he had grabbed from the library.
"VANCE!" Adrian roared with the terrifying, unbridled fury of a father whose children were threatened.
Vance spun his head toward the sound, his gun shifting away from me toward Adrian.
It was the second mistake Vance made that day.
I didn't hesitate. I stepped forward, swung my heavy backpack with all the force in my body, and slammed it straight into Vance’s head.
The heavy canvas bag, packed with hardbound books and steel water bottles, struck him square across the jaw with a sickening CRACK.
Vance stumbled sideways, his boots slipping on the frozen gravel path.
Before he could regain his footing, Adrian was on him.
Adrian drove the iron poker down into Vance’s wrist, forcing him to drop the gun onto the frozen ground. Adrian then slammed his fist twice into Vance's jaw, dropping the head of security onto his back in the snow-covered gravel.
Vance lay there, groaning, his eyes rolling back in his head, completely incapacitated.
Adrian stood over him, gasping for air, his chest heaving under his torn suit jacket. He dropped the iron poker, his hands shaking violently.
He slowly turned to look at us.
His four sons were standing together in the snow, clustered tight behind me, staring at their father with wide, disbelieving eyes.
Adrian took one slow step toward them, his face pale, tears cutting clean lines through the soot and blood on his cheeks.
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"Evan... Caleb... Noah... Luke..." Adrian whispered, his voice trembling so hard it broke. "I'm sorry. God, I am so sorry..."
He fell to his knees in the cold snow of his wife's ruined garden, dropping his head into his hands, sobbing uncontrollably—the terrifying, iron kingpin reduced to nothing more than a broken, grieving man who had almost lost everything that truly mattered.
