Chapter 126 - The Trench Runs Red
Before Eleanor could lower the glass, Vance moved.
He didn't fire at Eleanor; he fired three controlled bursts directly into the chandelier overhead. The heavy crystal fixture, laden with fake candles and brass brackets, sheared from the ceiling with a deafening screech of ripping metal, plummeting straight toward the center of the mahogany table.
"Get down!" I roared, throwing myself sideways to shove Clara behind the heavy oak side-cabinet as the chandelier smashed into the table with explosive force. Crystal shards sprayed across the room like shrapnel, shattering Eleanor's scotch glass into a thousand glittering flecks of amber and blood.
Sarah reacted with unnatural speed. She didn't scream; she rolled across the floorboards, coming up on one knee with Arthur’s antique revolver raised. A shot boomed through the enclosed space, the heavy .38 slug tearing through the wood of the sideboard inches above Clara’s head, showering the child’s hair with splintered mahogany.
"Vance, the perimeter!" I yelled, pulling my sidearm and firing two rounds into the wall just above Sarah’s head, forcing her to duck behind the ruined table.
From the hallway behind the dining room, the heavy steel security doors hissed open. Three private tactical contractors in sterile white snow-camo and closed-visor respirators swept into the room, their suppressed submachine guns already barking with rhythmic, muted thuds.
Vance met them with a wall of lead. The tactical operative dropped to a low crouch, sweeping his barrel across the entryway. The first contractor took two rounds to the ceramic chest plate, staggering back into the hallway, while the second caught a ricochet across the neck, spraying arterial mist against the white-painted faux-drywall.
"Emily, the vents!" Vance shouted over the deafening chatter of gunfire. His left sleeve was instantly shredded by incoming rounds, a dark bloom of blood soaking through the tactical weave. "The facility’s secondary blast seals are triggering! We have less than three minutes before the ocean floor vents flood this entire level!"
Across the room, Eleanor hadn't ducked. She had stood up, entirely indifferent to the bullets gouging deep trenches into the drywall around her. A single crystal shard had sliced across her cheek, drawing a thin line of red down her porcelain skin, but she didn't wipe it away. She looked down at me through the smoke and dust with an expression of cold, clinical disappointment.
"You were always such a messy child, Emily," Eleanor said over the roar of gunfire, her voice amplified by the room's internal communication system.
She reached beneath the ruined table, pressed a recessed iron stud on the central pedestal, and stepped backward. The wall behind her—the wall painted to look like our Connecticut living room’s fireplace—split down the center, sliding open to reveal a narrow, reinforced pressure lift.
"Sarah, secure the child," Eleanor ordered calmly as she stepped into the lift. "Let Emily drown with the remnants."
"Mother, wait!" Sarah scrambled toward the lift, but the steel panels slid shut with hydraulic finality, leaving Sarah stranded in the collapsing room with us.
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The look of absolute, soul-shattering realization on Sarah’s face was identical to the expression I had worn three years ago, when the front door of the Stamford house had slammed shut behind me, leaving me in the freezing Thanksgiving rain with a broken nose and empty pockets.
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