Chapter 10 - Locked Below
The heavy wooden door slammed shut with a deafening echo that vibrated through the damp stone walls of the underground study. Julian lunged forward, throwing his entire weight against the thick timber, but the deadbolt held firm. He slammed his fist against the wood in a burst of violent frustration.
"Hey! Open this door!" Julian roared, his voice bouncing back off the unyielding masonry. He grabbed the brass doorknob and shook it violently, but it spun uselessly in his grip.
Grace rushed to his side, shining her own phone flashlight around the small, windowless room. The air was quickly growing stale, thick with the scent of old dust and rising panic. "Julian, stop! Breaking it down from the inside won't work—it’s reinforced steel wrapped in wood. Whoever locked us in knew exactly what they were doing."
Julian stopped his assault on the door, breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling beneath his black suit jacket. He turned around slowly, his eyes wild with terror as he stared at the glowing laptop screen resting on the old wooden desk. The live webcam feed was still transmitting clearly, showing the empty upstairs kitchen. But the tall figure in the dark coat was no longer standing in the background.
The figure was gone.
"The girls," Julian gasped, his voice cracking with a raw, agonizing panic. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out his smartphone, and tapped furiously on the screen to dial the landline extension upstairs.
The phone rang once, twice, three times. Then, a soft click echoed through the speaker, followed by absolute silence.
“Daddy?” Lily’s tiny voice finally whispered through the phone speaker, sounding distant and terrified. “The bad man gave us another letter. He said we have to read it out loud or Grace and you are never coming back up.”
"Lily, listen to me very carefully," Julian shouted into his phone, pressing the device against his ear as if he could physically reach through the digital signal. "Do not open that letter! Lock the kitchen doors and hide in the pantry right now! Do you hear me?"
“We can’t, Daddy,” Maya chimed in, her voice trembling on the verge of tears. “The pantry door is locked from the outside. And... and someone is knocking on the back window.”
A loud, jarring thud echoed through the phone speaker, followed by the sound of breaking glass. Julian stared at the smartphone in his hand as if it had turned into a venomous snake. He whirled around to face Grace, his expression shifting from blind panic to a cold, suffocating realization.
"They aren't after me," Julian said, his voice terrifyingly calm. "And they aren't just after the audit files. They're taking my daughters."
Grace felt her heart skip a beat. She gripped the edge of the wooden desk, her mind racing through every detail of the house’s architecture. "There has to be another way out of here. The blueprints Clara found—did they show where these tunnels lead?"
"They lead to the old Victorian boiler room beneath the east wing," Julian said, stepping over the scattered surveillance photographs and rushing toward a dark, narrow archway at the back of the study. "Come on. Move!"
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Grace didn't hesitate. She plunged into the dark archway right behind Julian, the beam of his flashlight cutting through a thick cloud of dust and cobwebs. As they sprinted down the hidden corridor, the sound of a distant, heavy metallic gate slamming shut echoed through the stone walls ahead of them, followed by the faint, chilling sound of children crying out in terror.
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