Chapter 6 - The Voice of the Child
Sophie took two slow, hesitant steps forward across the cold river slate.
She had not run away. She had not hidden her face in her mother's apron. Her small five-year-old frame stood illuminated in the secondary spill of the weapon-light, her pink flannel pajamas glowing faintly against the dark stone. In her right arm, she clutched Barnaby against her ribs; her left hand hung open, small and fragile, hovering at her side.
"Mama..." Sophie said softly.
The word was so small, so innocent, that it cut through the thick, suffocating dread of the hallway like a thin blade.
Elena turned her head quickly, her breath catching. "Sophie, stay back! Stay behind me!"
Dante did not lower the pistol, but his eyes flicked down toward the child standing beside his hip. He saw the tremble in her small knees; he saw the tracks of dried tears through the dust on her cheeks; he saw the absolute, terrifying clarity in her hazel eyes.
Sophie was not looking at Dante. She was not looking at her mother.
She was looking directly past the barrel of the nine-millimeter pistol, her gaze plunging ten feet into the mouth of the brick tunnel where the white light dissolved into shadows.
Slowly, deliberately, Sophie raised her left arm.
Her small index finger pointed straight into the subterranean blackness.
"That’s where the man goes," Sophie whispered, her voice entirely devoid of doubt, stating a reality as simple as the sunrise. "After he knocks on my window."
The air in the hallway seemed to vanish.
Dante Moretti’s entire body went completely, terrifyingly rigid.
Every muscle along his spine locked into stone. The breath in his lungs seized, his ribs expanding against his tattoos as a cold, sickening realization hit his central nervous system like an injection of ice water.
He knocks on the cottage window. Then he walks inside.
The cottage bedroom was on the western edge of the retaining wall. This tunnel was beneath the central foundation of the main house. Which meant whoever was visiting Sophie’s window was not an outsider creeping past the perimeter fence at night.
Whoever was visiting the child was living inside the walls of the estate.
Before Dante could speak, before Elena could draw her next breath, a sound came from the depths of the brick corridor.
Thirty feet down, beyond the reach of the twelve-hundred-lumen LED beam, in the deep, freezing belly of the earth where the passage curved toward the river bluff—
Scrape.
It was the distinct, deliberate sound of a heavy leather boot shifting its weight over loose gravel.
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Bruno dropped his chin to the slate, his lips pulling back in silence, his throat vibrating with a frequency so deep it rattled the antique brass fittings of the open wall.
In the darkness of the tunnel, something moved.
