Chapter 10
"Of course I opened it from the outside," Mr. Duca replied, his brow furrowing deeply. He kept his flashlight trained on Julian, sensing a massive, terrifying shift in the atmosphere of the cell. "You were locked in."
Julian began to shake violently, the chains rattling against the concrete floor. He backed away, pressing himself against the cold stone wall, his eyes wide with an unspeakable, primal terror.
"No, no, no," Julian stammered, pulling at his hair with filthy hands. "They didn't lock it from the outside, Duca. The deadbolt... the big deadbolt was on the inside."
Mr. Duca froze. The air in his lungs turned to ice. He looked back at the heavy steel door. Julian was right. The deadbolt he had thrown back was positioned on the exterior of the room—meaning someone on the outside had locked it—but Julian's reaction implied the opposite.
"What are you saying, Julian?" Mr. Duca demanded, his deep voice carrying a lethal, rising panic. "Make sense."
"They didn't put me in here to keep me locked away from you," Julian sobbed, hyperventilating as he stared at the open doorway. "They told me that if I ever threw the deadbolt and locked myself in... it meant they were coming. It meant they were already inside the house."
The horrific reality crashed down on Mr. Duca with the force of a freight train. The room wasn't a prison. It was a panic room. Julian hadn't been knocking to get out. He had been knocking to warn them that the real threat was moving through the walls.
"Elias!" Mr. Duca roared into his earpiece, spinning around and sprinting back toward the corridor. "Elias, the walls are compromised! They are using the passages to bypass the perimeter!"
Static hissed violently in his ear. The clear, encrypted channel was being actively jammed.
"Elias, respond!" Mr. Duca shouted, running furiously back up the sloping stone corridor. Dust billowed wildly around his black leather shoes, his flashlight beam bouncing erratically off the ancient brickwork.
Suddenly, the static in his ear cleared for a fraction of a second.
"...sir, they’re in the third floor hallway!" Elias’s voice screamed through the earpiece, accompanied by the deafening, rapid-fire staccato of automatic gunfire. "They’re going for the master suite! They’re going for the kids—!"
The transmission cut out in a sharp, agonizing squeal, followed by dead silence.
Mr. Duca’s heart stopped. The girls. Mia and Lily were locked in the master suite on the third floor, directly in the path of a heavily armed assault team that had bypassed every single exterior security measure he had.
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He didn't draw a weapon. He didn't hesitate. Mr. Duca dropped the flashlight, plunging the corridor into near darkness, relying entirely on the faint ambient light spilling from the distant study opening. He moved with a speed and ferocity born of pure, unadulterated paternal terror, desperate to reach the six-year-old girl who had trusted him to keep her safe.
He reached the heavy mahogany opening of the bookcase and burst back into the warm, amber light of the study, sprinting toward the hallway doors, knowing that the real nightmare inside the Beacon Hill mansion had only just begun.
