Chapter 2 - The Shaft Beneath
They found the altered flooring twenty-three minutes later.
A heavy industrial shelving unit loaded with canned dry goods had been bolted to the pantry wall. Once Gabriel’s men unbolted the steel brackets and dragged the rack away, the floor anomaly became glaringly obvious: four square marble tiles sat three millimeters higher than the surrounding stone, sealed with a slightly darker, fresher silicone adhesive.
Aleandro stood back with his arms crossed, watching two tactical guards drive steel crowbars into the seams. With a sharp, wet crunch of tearing sealant, the stone slab was lifted away.
Underneath was concrete.
Underneath the concrete was a heavy, circular steel plate secured by six stainless-steel hex bolts.
Gabriel pulled an electric impact driver from his belt holster and backed the bolts out one by one. The metallic screaming of the machine echoed harsh and loud against the pantry walls. When the last bolt fell free, Gabriel hooked a steel crowbar under the lip and heaved the heavy plate back.
A waft of warm, dry, ozone-scented air surged up into the sanitized kitchen.
Beneath the steel lay darkness—a narrow, vertical iron shaft equipped with rusted ladder rungs, disappearing straight down into an abyss that swallowed the bright overhead kitchen lighting.
Gabriel immediately drew his silenced Sig Sauer 9mm from beneath his jacket, flicking off the safety with a sharp click. "Someone's been using this to enter the estate."
Hannah stepped up to the edge of the opening, peering past the guard’s shoulder into the dark hole. "No."
Every armed man in the room turned to look at the housekeeper. Gabriel’s eyes narrowed into dangerous slits. "You know that how, Collins?"
Hannah pointed a slender finger at the iron rungs of the ladder. "Look at the dust."
A fine, undisturbed layer of gray construction dust and dried mold coated the upper rungs. There were no glove smears. No boot prints breaking the surface. No scraped rust flakes lingering on the lip. She looked directly at Aleandro.
"If an intruder climbed up through here recently," she said, "they would have left marks in the grime. Those rungs haven't been touched in years."
Aleandro dropped to one knee beside the open hole. The faint, refined scent of his cedar cologne briefly cut through the subterranean smell of earth and warm copper. "Then why open the slab?"
"I don't know," Hannah admitted. She leaned a inch closer, her eyes scanning the dark perimeter of the shaft. "Wait. Look there."
Running down the eastern side of the concrete casing, tucked neatly behind the iron ladder, was a brand-new, matte-black electrical cable, no thicker than a thumb. Bright white plastic zip-ties fastened the modern cord to rusted iron brackets that were decades old. Whoever had installed it had done so recently, meticulously, and with total, unfettered access to the subterranean structure.
Aleandro’s face went terrifyingly placid—the absolute calm of a storm system gathering power. "That wiring isn't part of the original estate blueprint."
"No," Hannah agreed softly.
"What is it drawing power from?" Aleandro asked. "Or what is it powering?"
Hannah stared down into the darkness, feeling a cold knot of dread tighten in her stomach. "I think that's the question Maximus has been trying to ask you all night."
Behind them, the Cane Corso let out a low, rumbling growl from deep within his massive chest.
He was not growling down into the dark tunnel.
He was facing the kitchen, his dark eyes fixed on the people standing in the room.
Hannah turned around slowly. Twenty people were gathered in the space. Line cooks. Kitchen maids. Armed security personnel. Gabriel standing right at the edge of the open shaft, his pistol still gripped firmly in his hand.
One of them had routed that cable. One of them had sealed those tiles. One of them had lied.
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And for the first time since she had started working at the estate, Hannah realized why Aleandro Vitali was no longer staring down into the secret hole in his floor.
He was quietly studying the face of every single person standing around it.
