My mind immediately rushed to Leo. I pictured his pale face, the blue hospital blanket pulled up to his chest, his tired eyes looking toward the door, waiting for me to visit on my way home. If I went to federal prison, Leo would have no one. He would be transferred to an underfunded state ward, his experimental treatments abruptly canceled, his fragile immune system completely exposed.
The raw terror threatened to completely paralyze me, but a sudden, white-hot flash of anger broke through the fear.
Gerald and Victor had chosen me because they thought I was weak. They looked at my exhaustion, my poverty, my desperate love for my brother, and saw nothing but a convenient target. They assumed I would just put my head down and quietly accept my destruction because people with no money rarely win against people with power.
I stood up quickly, wiping the tears aggressively from my face.
I was not going to let these corrupt men destroy my family.
I needed to get out of this room. And I needed to secure proof that they were the ones stealing the art and the wine before the police arrived at midnight. I needed a photograph of the transport van, or a video of Gerald loading the crates. I needed leverage.
I began frantically searching the walls of the bunker. There were no windows. The door was solid steel.
My eyes darted toward the ceiling above the commercial dryers. There was a large, rectangular ventilation shaft covered by a thick iron grating. The shaft fed directly into the main HVAC network that serviced the subterranean levels. I had spent hours cleaning the dust filters on these exact vents in other rooms; I knew they were wide enough to fit a person, provided they were willing to endure the claustrophobia.
I dragged a heavy plastic laundry bin across the tile floor, positioning it directly underneath the vent. I grabbed a solid iron floor-buffer handle that had been left leaning in the corner by the night crew.
I climbed onto the unstable edge of the laundry bin, balancing myself carefully. Raising the iron handle, I drove the metal tip aggressively against the rusted corner bolts of the iron grating.
Clang. Clang. Crack.
It took ten agonizing minutes of brute force, my muscles burning and my knuckles bleeding from the rough edges, before the old bolts finally gave way. The heavy iron grating swung downward on its hinge.
I pulled myself up, shoving my torso into the dark, dusty cavern of the ventilation shaft.
The space was suffocatingly tight. I had to army-crawl, dragging myself forward by my elbows, my face pressed against the cold sheet metal. The air tasted heavily of dust and stale laundry detergent. I moved blindly through the darkness, following the directional flow of the air current toward the service wings.
I crawled for what felt like miles, taking shallow, desperate breaths. Every time the metal groaned under my weight, I prayed the brackets holding the shaft to the concrete ceiling wouldn't snap.
Finally, I saw a faint square of light illuminating a grate ahead of me.
I shimmied closer and peered down through the metal slats.
I was directly above the prep kitchen, adjacent to the service elevator. The room was dark and completely empty.
I kicked the vent cover loose, carefully lowering myself onto the large stainless-steel prep island below. I dropped silently to the floor, my gray uniform now covered in a thick layer of black dust and grease.
I checked the large digital clock mounted above the commercial ovens. It was 10:45 PM.
The transport van was arriving in fifteen minutes.
I knew the camera blind spots in the prep kitchen intimately. I kept low to the ground, slipping between the metal counters, creeping toward the heavy oak doors that led to the central corridor. I needed to reach the subterranean wine cellar. If the cellar was empty, I would know they had already moved the merchandise to the loading dock, and I could catch them in the act.
I pushed the oak door open quietly and stepped into the dim, climate-controlled hallway.
The entrance to the wine vault was fifty feet away. The door was a massive slab of reinforced steel and ballistic glass, secured by a state-of-the-art biometric locking mechanism. It required a retinal scan to open. Only Gerald Thorne and the absent billionaire, Adrian Whitmore, had their irises coded into the master system.
As I crept closer, I stopped dead in my tracks.
The heavy vault door was standing wide open.
The glowing green light on the biometric scanner confirmed that an authorized retinal scan had just been accepted.