“Daniel, the service hall!
Move!”
Julian barked into the dark.
Beside me, crouched low with his forehead pressed against the mahogany grain of the desk, Daniel didn’t move toward the hall.
He reached across the darkness, blindly sweeping his arm until his fingers found my wrist.
He clamped down, his grip desperate, breathing through his teeth.
“Sarah.
Sarah, can you breathe?”
“Get her under the sill!”
Margaret’s voice came from the opposite side of the room, shockingly close to the floor.
She had dropped behind the low marble coffee table.
There was no terror in her tone, only an icy, vibrating rage.
“Julian, the breaker box is in the pantry.
They cut the primary line from the alley.”
“It’s not burglars, Mother,” Julian said, his voice dropped to a razor-sharp whisper right at my ear.
His left arm stayed braced across my chest, pinning me safely behind the heavy hardwood paneling.
In his right hand, drawn from the holster beneath his charcoal jacket, was a compact, matte-black automatic.
“They brought subsonics.
And tear gas.
This isn’t Mark Whitmore banging on an iron gate.
This is Vance’s cleanup crew.”
Another cylinder came bouncing through the ruined window frame, spitting white plumes across the ceiling.
The acrid gas caught in my lungs, and my damaged trachea seized, locking up like a rusted valve.
A violent, suffocating cough tore through my ribs, every layer of grafted skin across my torso screaming as if the fire from nine years ago had just rekindled beneath my ribs.
“She can’t breathe in here!”
Daniel cried, his voice breaking.
“Julian, she has seventy percent lung reduction on the left side!
The gas will kill her!”
“Then we don’t stay in here,” Julian said.
He didn’t hesitate.
He holstered the pistol with a sharp click, slipped his arms beneath my thighs and around my back, and lifted me clean out of the wheelchair before I could protest.
My limp, contracted legs trailed against his knees, useless, dead weight.
“Hold my neck, Sarah,” he commanded into my hair.
“Bury your face in my lapel.
Do not open your eyes.”
I clutched at the heavy wool of his suit jacket.
His heart was hammering beneath the fabric, steady, slow, and heavy, like the pendulum of an iron clock.
Julian rose from a crouch, kicked open the concealed service door built into the mahogany wainscoting behind the desk, and plunged into the pitch-black narrowness of the servants’ corridor.
Daniel was right behind him, his shoulder slamming into the plaster as he guided Margaret through the door by the elbow.
We tumbled down three steps into the low, brick-vaulted basement of the mansion—the old carriage cellar that dated back to 1845.
The air down here was cold, smelling of ancient mortar, damp sand, and centuries of dried marsh silt.
The chemical sting of the smoke faded, replaced by the deep, subterranean chill of Charleston’s buried water table.
Julian set me down gently onto a stack of folded canvas boat tarps leaning against an arched brick pillar.
He pulled his weapon again, turning toward the iron-grated stairs we had just descended, his frame silhouette against the faint gray fog drifting down from the library.
“Daniel, lock the bulkhead,” Julian ordered.
Daniel threw the heavy oak crossbar across the cellar door, his breath coming in jagged, wheezing gasps.
He turned around, his tuxedo shirt torn at the collar, his hands shaking violently.
“Who were they, Julian?”
Daniel’s voice cracked in the dark, the civilized facade of the Charleston architect finally disintegrating into raw hysteria.
