In Front of 280 Wedding Guests, My Father Called Me a Liar for Refusing to Give My Sister MY House, Then Grabbed Me and Hurled Me Into a Wall—He Thought He Could Silence Me Forever, Until One Guest’s Livestream Turned His Perfect Reputation Into a Nightmare… / Chapter 33 / 70

Chapter 33 - The Black Fleet

A hail of high-velocity rounds ripped through the brickwork above my head, spraying sharp shards of terracotta and blinding red dust into the air.

Marcus leaned out from behind the cistern, firing three controlled, deafening shots down the narrow corridor. A mercenary cried out as a round caught him in the shoulder, his tactical light crashing to the floor and spinning wildly, casting frenzied shadows against the ceiling.

"Go! Get her inside!" Marcus roared, smoke pouring from his pistol as he fired two more suppressive shots toward the cellar staircase.

I threw my weight against the counterweight lever. With a brutal groan of iron gears, the false brick wall swung inward, revealing a dark, yawning shaft carved directly into the black shale. The air that rushed out of the tunnel was bitterly cold, smelling of ancient wet slate, stagnant water, and a faint, acrid tinge of sulfur.

"Chloe, in! Now!" I shoved her into the opening. She slipped on the wet rock, tumbling forward onto her hands and knees, but scrambled desperately into the blackness.

Marcus backed toward the opening, firing his final rounds at the advancing shadows. "Julian, the charges!" he yelled. "Look at the main support pillars!"

I glanced back toward the center of the cellar through the haze of gunsmoke. Two of the mercenaries were hastily clamping plastic explosives with magnetic brackets directly to the thick, cast-iron support pillars that held up the manor's central hall—the pillars that sat directly over the subterranean containment cap.

"They aren't just killing us," I said, a wave of cold fury washing over my shock. "They’re blowing the containment plug. Arthur wants the whole hillside to collapse into the cavern. He’s going to bury the evidence, the house, and us under fifty thousand tons of mud and water."

"Then we have about three minutes before this entire mountain becomes a crater," Marcus snapped, diving through the open hatch of the tunnel.

I grabbed the heavy iron ring on the inside of the stone hatch and slammed it shut, sliding the thick forged deadbolt into place just as a burst of automatic fire peppered the outer iron plate with deafening, bell-like rings.

We were in total darkness.

"Flashlights off," I whispered, panting, my lungs burning from the sulfur and cordite. "Follow the floor rail. Tobias laid down a narrow-gauge cart track for hauling slate. If you feel the iron rail under your boot, you won't fall down an exploratory borehole."

"Julian, my hands..." Chloe was weeping softly in the pitch black, her voice shaking violently. "I gave him everything. I let him control my trust. I stood by him when he humiliated you at my rehearsal dinner... I thought he was trying to protect our inheritance. I thought he was trying to protect me."

"He was protecting his freedom, Chloe," I said, guiding her forward by her shoulder through the damp, narrow passage. "To Arthur, children aren't family. We’re legal instruments. You were his tool to maintain title, and I was his scapegoat when the state started auditing the corporate land holdings."

"Well, his legal instrument just revoked his power of attorney," Marcus said from behind us, his voice grim as he reloaded his weapon in the dark by muscle memory alone. "If we get out of this gorge alive, Julian, I’m not just presenting this ledger to the state attorney. I’m calling the Department of Justice’s environmental crimes division and the federal grand jury in Philadelphia."

Before we had taken another twenty paces, the world behind us ended.

A deep, chest-crushing detonation tore through the cellar we had just abandoned. The shockwave slammed down the narrow stone shaft like an invisible fist, knocking all three of us off our feet onto the sharp shale. A terrible, shrieking roar of buckling iron and crumbling stone followed—the sound of Eleanor’s hundred-year-old manor collapsing in upon itself.

And then came the water.

Not a trickle, but a thundering, subterranean torrent. The explosion had severed the bypass valves. Millions of gallons of pressurized groundwater from the deep limestone caverns were now rushing upward into the vacuum left by the collapsing house.