PART 2:
PART 2:
The passage was so narrow that my shoulders brushed both walls, and the weak light from Elena’s key chain barely reached beyond her feet. Dust covered the boards, old pipes groaned overhead, and every sound from the mansion traveled through the wood around us. Elena moved without hesitation, avoiding loose boards and turning at junctions I had never known existed. When I asked how often she had walked behind my walls, she answered, “Often enough to know which floors betray you.” It was not the answer a maid was supposed to give, but nothing about that night was ordinary.
I asked where she had found the gun beneath her apron. She said it came from the emergency lockbox near the linen cabinet, then calmly told me I kept the key taped under the bottom shelf. I had hidden it there nine years earlier and forgotten it myself. Elena had noticed because cleaning around powerful men taught her which objects they believed no one else could see. I had spent years paying guards to study threats outside my mansion. The woman carrying my laundry had noticed the dangers already living inside it.
We stopped behind a narrow ventilation opening overlooking the upstairs gallery. Two men were searching the west wing while a radio crackled with Tony’s voice ordering them to check every room. He had not been inside when Elena pulled me into hiding, but now he was personally directing the hunt. That told me the plan was failing, and failing plans made traitors impatient. It also meant the perimeter was completely under his control. No call, camera, locked door, or armed guard in the house could be trusted.
Farther along the passage, Elena and I crouched behind the library wall and listened to Marcus confront Tony. Marcus demanded to know why my car was in the garage when I was nowhere in the mansion. Tony reminded him of the payment records and photographs linking me to Carlo’s killers, but Marcus admitted he had only seen copies. “Or you altered them,” he said. For the first time, I heard doubt beneath his anger. Tony answered by pressing the wound I had created: when Marcus questioned me months earlier, I had ordered him to let the dead rest.
Tony told him I had never truly made him my heir, only given him enough power to remain useful. He claimed Carlo would have ruled the city if I had not removed him. The lie worked because part of it was true: my brother had wanted my position, borrowed money from dangerous men, and made promises he had no authority to keep. I had not ordered his death, but I had failed to save him from the consequences of his choices. Instead of explaining that shame to Marcus, I had hidden it. Tony had turned my silence into evidence.
A board beneath Elena’s foot gave a quiet groan, and Tony immediately raised his pistol toward the wall. We descended a narrow ladder while he struck the hidden panel above us, once, then again. Elena wanted to escape through the pantry, but I told her we had to reach the wine cellar. Beneath the oldest part of the house, behind racks no one questioned, I had hidden the real ledger, the original records, and Carlo’s sealed envelope. Those were the things Tony wanted. They were also the only things that might keep Marcus from becoming his father’s final victim.
We ran toward the cellar until Elena stopped beneath a tiny red light attached to an ancient beam. A modern motion sensor had been installed inside the servants’ corridor since her last visit. The light changed from blinking to solid, locks engaged on the other side of the walls, and a hidden speaker came alive above us. Tony’s voice filled the passage with quiet amusement. “Good evening, Vincent,” he said. “You really should have come home on time.”