Chapter 5 - Shadows Above
Valerie didn't sleep.
She sat on the wooden stool beside the pallet, her eyes fixed on the silver ring resting against Brennan’s collarbone, then looking over at her father's leather ledger sitting on the desk two feet away.
My father set the fire.
What did that mean? Raymond Cross had been accused of stealing forty million dollars from the Vance Holdings investment firm. The evidence against him had been airtight—electronic transfer signatures, encrypted bank logs, shell company documents. Raymond had protested his innocence until the day he was found dead in his solitary cell.
If the Vance family had framed her father... why was the chief of that very family currently lying on her floor, bleeding out, relying on her to stay alive?
At 8:00 a.m., the floorboards directly above the bunker vibrated softly.
Valerie's head snapped up.
Above her, in the studio apartment, heavy footsteps were walking across the floor. Not the light, hurried steps of her landlord, but slow, deliberate, heavy boots.
Valerie immediately extinguished the battery LED light. The bunker fell into pitch darkness.
She pulled a heavy black iron iron-pipe tool she used for digging from beneath the bench, creeping quietly to the base of the ladder, holding her breath. Beside her on the floor, Brennan’s breathing was slow and shallow, deep in his drug-induced coma.
Through the narrow cracks of the wooden ceiling trapdoor, faint voices drifted down.
"Search the back closet," a harsh, deep voice ordered from inside her apartment. "Dante said the ambulance turned down this block before disappearing off the tracker."
"There's nothing here, boss," another voice replied, footsteps stopping directly over the hidden trapdoor. "Just a dusty room with an old rug. Looks like some broke girl lives here."
"Check the yard," the first voice snapped. "Don Marco wants Brennan's head on a spike before the sun sets. If anyone in this neighborhood hid him, burn the whole block down."
The heavy footsteps moved away, the back door opened, slamming shut with a heavy bang.
Valerie stood frozen in the dark, her chest heaving softly, her knuckles white around the iron pipe.
Don Marco. The rival syndicate captain. The man who had launched the coup against Brennan Vance.
If those men had lifted the rug in her closet, they would have found the wooden trapdoor. They would have come down into this hole and slaughtered both of them without hesitation.
May you like
She turned back toward the dark shape on the floor.
Brennan Vance was not just a wounded man; he was a walking bomb. And by bringing him into her secret sanctuary, Valerie had brought the full, murderous fury of the Los Angeles underworld directly over her head.
