Chapter 8 - INTO THE HOLLOW WALL
The air that poured out of the black opening was stale, carrying the smell of copper, damp lime, and old dust.
Duca stood in the opening, his broad shoulders filling the narrow doorway. Behind him, the warm amber light of the study spilled across his back, casting a long, imposing shadow down the unfinished timber steps that descended into the dark shaft.
“Stay there, Mia,” he commanded softly without looking back.
He reached to the side of the entrance and grabbed a heavy brass fire poker from the hearth set, its weighted handle cold and solid in his grip. Stepping through the false front of the library, he entered the void.
The space was a hidden architectural cavity—a forgotten servant’s access shaft built during the Gilded Age, designed to allow staff to move between the basement furnaces and the roof without disturbing the grand families in their parlors. But someone had modified it recently.
At the base of a short wooden flight of stairs, barely six feet below the level of the study floor, lay a figure sprawled across the dust.
Duca descended the stairs two at a time, the brass poker lowered but ready. As his eyes adjusted to the dim shaft, illuminated only by the light bleeding from the open bookcase above, he saw a woman lying on her side, tangled in a coarse wool blanket.
Her hair was light brown, tied back in a braid identical to Mia’s. Her skin was terribly pale, her lips dry and cracked, and a heavy sweat glistened across her brow.
“Grace?” Duca’s voice cracked with raw shock.
It was Grace Harper.
She was shivering violently, her breathing shallow and wheezing. On the floor beside her was a shattered ceramic bowl and a rusted set of keys that did not belong to the estate’s standard locks. Around her neck hung an old, tarnished locket. She had clawed at the inner wooden paneling until her fingernails were bleeding, her desperate knocks the only thing that had kept her conscious.
“Mr.… Duca…” she gasped, her voice nothing more than a ragged rasp. Her hand reached out blindly in the dark, catching the cuff of his trousers. “The… the stairs… I fell… the door clicked shut behind me… couldn't reach the latch…”
Duca dropped the brass poker with a clatter. He fell to his knees in the dust, uncaring of his fine trousers, his massive hands immediately taking her cold, shaking fingers into his.
“Don't speak,” he said, his voice dropping into a fierce, commanding calm that brooked no argument. “I’ve got you, Grace. You’re out. You’re safe.”
He slipped his arms beneath her shivering form, lifting her with steady, effortless power. She was terrifyingly light, burning with an intense fever that radiated through her thin cotton uniform.
May you like
As he turned to carry her up the hidden stairs, Duca looked down at the floor of the secret cavity. The lock on the interior of the secret panel had not failed by accident. A heavy wedge of pine had been kicked beneath the doorframe, jamming the antique release mechanism from the outside.
Someone had trapped her here.
