Chapter 16 - The Underground Path

I didn't answer. I didn't breathe.

The cellar was cold, smelling of aged oak barrels, damp soil, and the sweet rot of forgotten apples. Daniel’s voice drifted down the chute, accompanied by the frantic sounds of a struggle—Vance was holding them off, but he couldn't hold an entire hit squad alone.

I remembered my father’s words from fifteen years ago: *If the storm ever comes, sweetheart, the orchard has two exits. Walk toward the smell of the river.*

Clutching Chloe tightly, shielding her tiny head beneath my woolen cardigan, I navigated the pitch-black basement toward the western wall. My hands traced the rough-hewn fieldstone until my fingers found the uneven mortar seam. I pushed. A heavy wooden slab, balanced on counterweights, pivoted inward with a low scrape.

Behind it lay the old drainage culvert running beneath the orchard toward the Hudson tributary.

I slipped inside, pulling the heavy stone door shut until it clicked on its spring-latch. The gunfire above instantly muffled, reduced to distant, rhythmic thuds like a dying pulse.

The culvert was damp and narrow. Water trickled around my ankles, cold as melting frost. Chloe squirmed against my chest, letting out a small, terrified mewl.

"Shh, baby, mama’s here," I whispered into the crook of her neck, tears finally spilling down my cheeks. "I won't let him touch you. I swear on my life, he will never touch you."

For ten excruciating minutes, I trudged through the mud and darkness, following the downward slope until the cold air began to carry the scent of pine needles and rushing river water. Ahead, a circle of faint moonlight pierced the end of the culvert.

I burst out into the dripping rain among the dense thickets at the edge of the property line.

Fifty yards away, parked on an overgrown fire road beneath weeping willows, a black unmarked SUV sat idling with its headlights cut. A figure stood by the open driver’s door, weapon drawn, scanning the tree line.

My heart seized. Was it Daniel’s men?

May you like

My fiancé let his friend chop off my mother’s waist-length

My husband spent the night with another woman

My husband brought his mistress to our nine-year-old daughter’s dance

Then the figure turned. The interior dome light illuminated the sharp, unmistakable features of a woman in a dark trench coat.

It was Madison.