Chapter 5 - The Red Corridor
The service stairs were narrow, made of unpainted concrete that smelled of old dust and oil. The red emergency lights pulsed every three seconds, casting long, bloody shadows across the steps as I carried Luca down toward the basement levels.
The sound of the gunfire didn't stop. It followed us through the walls—a heavy, rhythmic thumping that sounded like someone was hitting the house with a massive iron hammer. Every time a shot went off, the concrete beneath my feet vibrated, the dust falling from the ceiling like gray snow onto my hair.
"Elena," Luca whimpered, his face buried so deep into the silk of my blouse that his words were muffled by the fabric. "The fish are upstairs. They're coming for my shoes."
"There are no fish, Luca," I said, my breath coming in short, agonizing gasps as my lungs burned from the weight. My skirt was catching on the sharp edges of the iron railing, the wool tearing with a dry, ripping sound, but I didn't slow down.
We reached the bottom of the stairs—a long, white-tiled corridor that led to the laundry reserves and the main electrical vault. The lights here were out completely, the only illumination coming from the red emergency exit signs over the steel doors.
At the end of the hall, a single figure was standing near the breaker box.
It wasn't Marco.
It was a short, thin man wearing a grease-stained mechanic’s jacket with the name Vince embroidered in red over the pocket. He had a heavy black crowbar in his left hand and a short-barreled submachine gun dangling from a nylon strap over his shoulder. He was trying to wedge the crowbar into the seam of the heavy steel vault door—the one Marco had told me to find.
He heard my sneakers against the tile.
He turned around with the quick, jerky movement of a rat caught in a pantry, his eyes widening when he saw the grey uniform and the boy in my arms.
"Well, look at that," he said. His teeth were yellow, small, crowded together like corn kernels. "The little prince. The Moretti old man said twenty points to whoever brings the kid out alive."
He dropped the crowbar. It hit the concrete with a loud, ringing clang that made Luca scream. The man reached for the submachine gun, his finger moving toward the trigger guard with a slow, casual certainty that told me he had done this in four other houses before this one.
I didn't have a weapon. I didn't have a silver revolver like Marco or an assault rifle like the guards upstairs.
But I had the water glass.
I had been holding it since breakfast—the heavy, lead-crystal tumbler from the sideboard that I had forgotten to set down when Marco burst into the conservatory.
I didn't think about Clara. I didn't think about the law. I stepped forward, using the momentum of my running body, and threw the heavy crystal glass directly into his face.
It didn't hit his shoulder. It hit him right between the eyes, the lead glass shattering into forty sharp pieces with a sound like a pistol shot. The man let out a sharp, wet grunt, his hands flying to his nose as blood—dark and thick under the red light—sprang through his fingers.
He fell backward against the breaker box, his submachine gun slipping from his strap and clattering across the tiled floor until it hit my sneaker.
I didn't pick it up. Poverty teaches you that guns only bring more guys with bigger guns.
I grabbed the heavy iron crowbar from the floor, wedged it into the outer handle of the laundry storage door next to us, and pulled it shut from the inside, dropping the thick iron bar across the brackets just as the man’s bleeding hands struck the steel panels from the outside.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
"Open it, you bitch!" he screamed through the seam. "Open it or I'll burn the whole floor!"
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I sat on a pile of dirty table linens, my arms locked around Luca so tightly I could feel the small, frantic rhythm of his heart against my ribs like a bird caught in a chimney.
"Don't breathe, Luca," I whispered into the dark. "Just don't breathe."
