Chapter 7 - The Descent
"Clear the ground floor! Check the superintendent's log!" a harsh, gravelly voice barked from the stairwell.
Heavy leather boots began thudding up the wooden steps, moving with military discipline. Two men per landing.
Hollis grabbed Elena by the arm, half-carrying her toward the apartment's back service door—a narrow wooden panel that led directly to the building's maintenance shaft. She unlocked it with a quiet click, ushering Elena inside into the pitch-black darkness just as heavy knuckles pounded violently on her front door.
*BANG. BANG. BANG.*
"Open the door! Gas company, emergency inspection!"
Hollis pulled the service door shut behind them, sliding the internal bolt into place. The scent of damp soot, rusted iron, and decades of dust filled their lungs.
"Step carefully," Hollis breathed into Elena’s ear. "The metal ladder is slick."
Below them lay a thirty-foot drop into the old boiler cellar. Elena bit down on her lip until blood flowed, the agony of her stitched wound flaring with every rung she descended. Hollis stayed right below her, using her own shoulders to support the girl's feet whenever her strength gave out.
Above them, the apartment door crashed open with the sound of snapping wood.
Footsteps pounded across Hollis’s worn living room rug. Furniture was overturned. Glass shattered.
"Boss! Look here!" a man shouted from inside the bathroom. "Fresh gauze in the trash! Blood on the tub drain! Someone cleaned her up here!"
"Find the tenant!" the lead voice snarled. "The car in the alley is registered to a Hollis Vance. Find her, find the kid, and skin them until she tells us which way the girl ran!"
Inside the dark shaft, Elena’s body went rigid with horror. She looked down at Hollis in the gloom, her eyes wide with overwhelming guilt. *They're going after Toby.*
Hollis didn't hesitate. She reached the cellar floor, pulled Elena down into the shadows behind the massive iron furnace, and took out her prepaid burner phone.
Her fingers flew across the keypad, dialing Martha Gable’s landline.
"Martha," Hollis whispered the second the line clicked open.
"Hollis? What is all that racket upstairs? There are men—"
"Martha, listen to me," Hollis interrupted, her voice deathly calm, laced with an authority she hadn't used in years. "Take Toby from the school bus stop right now. Do not bring him back to the street. Take him to Saint Jude’s chapel on 8th Street. Ask for Father Thomas. Tell him the girl with the silver cross sent you. Do you understand me?"
"Hollis, you're scaring me—"
"Do it now, Martha! If you love my boy, run!"
Hollis hung up, popped the battery out of the phone, and snapped the SIM card between her thumbs.
She turned to Elena. "Marco won't stop until you're dead, and now he won't stop until my son is dead to keep me quiet."
Elena gripped Hollis’s coat, tears streaming down her pale face. "What do we do? We can't fight them. Marco has two hundred men in this district alone."
"We don't fight Marco," Hollis said, her gaze hardening into flint. "We go straight to the monster who can crush him."
"Dante?" Elena gasped. "I told you, he thinks I'm an imposter! He will shoot us before we cross the lobby!"
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"Not if we bring him something only his real sister would know," Hollis said. "Tell me, Elena. What did you say to me last night in the alley? You said: *'Tell Dante... the cellar.'* What is in the cellar?"
***
