Chapter 4 - The Trap Closes
We turned around in unison.
Standing at the top of the concrete stairs, framed by the harsh fluorescent light of the library above, was Helen Wheeler. She wasn't wearing her prayer robe anymore. She was dressed in a tailored, charcoal-grey Chanel pantsuit, her silver hair pulled back into an immaculate French twist. In her right hand, she held something that made my heart leap into my throat: a heavy-duty, industrial padlock and a set of master keys.
Behind her stood two massive men in dark suits—private security contractors hired from out of state, carrying heavy-duty zip ties and tactical restraints.
“You really thought you could outsmart me with a little bedtime story hour, didn't you, Penelope?” Helen sneered, descending the first three steps with slow, deliberate precision. Her gold watch caught the light, gleaming like a small, metallic eye watching our execution. “Conrad, step away from that woman. Have you lost what little mind your father left you?”
Conrad flinched, pulling back from me as if my touch had burned him, but he didn't climb the stairs toward his mother. Instead, he stood frozen between us and the exit, his hands twitching nervously at his sides.
“Mother... stop this,” Conrad pleaded, his voice cracking. “Penelope is right. We can't keep burying people. We can't keep hiding bodies and medical records in the basement. It’s over. The foundation is rotting.”
Helen stopped on the stairs. Her eyes narrowed into slits of pure ice.
“The foundation is solid, Conrad, because I poured it with my own bare hands while your father was busy drinking away his inheritance,” she hissed, her voice echoing off the concrete walls. “You think a pretty public relations girl and a stubborn brat can unravel forty years of Vance—no, Wheeler dominance? We own the city council, we own the zoning board, and by morning, the police will receive a formal missing persons report stating that our new bride suffered a tragic, sudden psychological break during our wedding celebration and fled into the night.”
My blood ran cold. She wasn't just planning to lock us in the basement; she was planning to erase us entirely.
“You won’t get away with this,” I said, stepping in front of Toby to shield him with my body. “My agency has automated cloud backups of every single document in this room. The moment my phone doesn't ping a location update by 6:00 a.m., an entire legal team led by my grandfather’s former partners will trigger a federal audit and a public corruption exposé.”
Helen paused. For a fraction of a second, a flicker of genuine uncertainty crossed her heavily made-up face. She looked at my designer handbag resting on the metal desk behind me.
“You think I didn't check your bag while you were busy playing nurse?” Helen smiled, a cruel, triumphant smirk stretching across her lips. She reached into her Chanel jacket pocket and pulled out my smartphone, holding it up like a trophy before dropping it onto the concrete floor and crushing it beneath the heel of her shoe with a sickening crunch.
“Your cloud backups require a secure two-factor authentication token, Penelope,” Helen said smoothly. “Which is currently sitting on the kitchen island, dismantled and soaking in a glass of bleach. By morning, there won't be a backup left in existence.”
The security guards started down the stairs, their heavy boots thudding against the metal-reinforced steps.
Toby clutched the back of my blouse, his small fingers digging into the silk. “What do we do, Aunt Penelope? They’re going to lock us up like they did to Aunt Clara.”
My mind raced. Every PR crisis I had ever managed, every corporate scandal I had ever spun—none of it mattered if we didn't survive the next five minutes. I glanced around the underground archive, my eyes darting past the filing cabinets, past the corkboards, toward the back wall where a heavy, secondary fire escape door stood half-hidden behind a rack of old blueprints.
“Toby,” I whispered urgently, leaning down so only he could hear. “When I say run, you sprint toward that blue door at the back. It leads to the old utility service tunnel under the garden. Don't look back. Just run straight toward the iron ladder that leads up to the greenhouse.”
“And you?” the boy asked, his voice shaking.
“I’ll buy you the time,” I said.
Before the security guards could reach the midpoint of the stairs, I grabbed the heavy leather scrapbook off the desk and hurled it with every ounce of my strength directly at the overhead fluorescent light fixture.
May you like
The heavy book shattered the glass tubes in a shower of sparks and blinding white light, plunging the basement into sudden, disorientive darkness.
“Grab them!” Helen screamed from the stairs, her voice laced with panic as the room went black.
