Chapter 21 - The Cold Horizon
"Eleanor, that's enough!" Nicholas stepped between her weapons and me, his eyes blazing with fury. "The whole city saw Evelyn at the wedding! The board knows! If we disappear tonight, you'll spend the rest of your life in a federal penitentiary!"
"My dear Nicholas," Eleanor chuckled softly, shaking her head. "You inherit your grandfather's fatal flaw: you confuse leverage with power. A scandal only exists if someone with standing is alive to litigate it. Tomorrow morning, the press will mourn the tragic loss of the Blackwood heir, his unstable bride, and her long-lost, criminal father in a gas explosion at an abandoned estate."
She looked directly past Nicholas, her cold, reptilian eyes locking onto mine.
"You should have let Martha cut your throat instead of your hair, little girl," Eleanor whispered. "It would have been so much faster."
She raised her gloved hand to signal her men.
"Wait," my father said suddenly, stepping out from behind the desk.
He didn't raise his gun. Instead, he pulled a small, black plastic remote from inside his coat sleeve. A single red light pulsed on its casing.
"Do you really think I didn't learn how you operate after twelve years of hiding in the dark, Eleanor?" my father said, his voice dropping into a low, deadly register. "This house sits directly above the old iron mines. There are two hundred pounds of industrial demolition charges packed into the foundation beneath our feet."
The tactical guards froze, their eyes darting toward their commander.
Eleanor's smile didn't waver, but her knuckles whitened against the pearl handle of her cane. "You're bluffing, Arthur. You wouldn't kill your own daughter."
"I don't have to," my father said. He reached behind him with his left hand, grabbing my arm and shoving me backward toward the decorative library fireplace.
"Nicholas! The grate! Drop!" my father roared.
Nicholas slammed his weight against the iron grate inside the massive hearth, exposing the dark, vertical mouth of an old escape tunnel. He grabbed my waist, pulling me down with him into the abyss just as my father thumbed the detonator.
A thunderous explosion tore through the manor above us. Concrete, fire, and shattering stone obliterated the world in a deafening white flash.
We plummeted ten feet through darkness, landing hard on a pile of damp coal dust inside an abandoned drainage cavern. The floor above us groaned, collapsing into a mountain of flaming rubble that sealed the tunnel entrance behind us in an impenetrable wall of fire and rock.
Coughing through the thick smoke, Nicholas helped me up. Blood trickled down his temple, but his grip on me was iron. My father dropped down beside us, coughing violently, covered in gray ash, his remote shattered.
"We have to move," my father wheezed. "The blast will only hold them for five minutes. There’s an emergency boat moored at the subterranean outlet by the lake shore."
We ran through the damp, subterranean darkness, the smell of sulfur and wet earth burning our nostrils. At the end of the tunnel, a pale sliver of gray morning light cut through the gloom.
We burst out onto a concealed, rocky inlet at the base of the bluffs. Moored against the crude wooden pier was a sleek, black offshore interceptor boat, its twin engines idling with a low, predatory rumble.
"We made it," I gasped, sobbing with relief, clutching the tattered remains of my wedding dress around my shivering frame. "Nicholas, we made it!"
The cabin door of the boat swung open.
A figure stepped out onto the mist-shrouded deck, holding a silenced pistol leveled directly at my father's chest.
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It wasn't one of Eleanor's security guards.
It was my mother.
