Chapter 5 - Return to the Ruin
The sun had long since dipped below the horizon, plunging Thornwood Ridge into absolute darkness. The demolition crew had been sent home with strict orders to halt all heavy machinery until further notice, leaving the old manor shrouded in an eerie, unnatural silence.
A single black Range Rover crawled up the unpaved access road, its headlights cutting sharp beams through the dense fog rolling off the lake.
Warren Cade stepped out of the vehicle, his trench coat buttoned to the throat, a heavy tactical flashlight gripped firmly in his right hand. Beside him walked Detective Marcus Thorne, his service weapon unholstered and resting comfortably in its tactical thigh rig.
"You sure about this, Cade?" Thorne whispered, scanning the rotting perimeter fence. "Viktor's enforcers aren't subtle. If they know we're poking around for Elena's files, they won't hesitate to burn this place to the ground—with us inside it."
"Let them try," Warren said coldly. "This is my property now. Every square inch of it."
They bypassed the front entrance and headed straight toward the rear courtyard, moving past the small, silent kennel where Mila had hidden for two days. Warren paused for a fraction of a second, feeling a phantom echo of the little girl’s terror, before pushing open a rusted side door that led directly into the manor’s cavernous basement.
The air inside was thick with the scent of mold, ancient paper, and wet stone.
Thorne swept his flashlight beam across the vaulted brick ceiling. "Place looks like a mausoleum. What are we looking for?"
"Elena’s husband was an archivist," Warren said, shining his light along a row of rotting wooden shelving units lining the damp stone walls. "If he discovered something about the estate’s title history before he died, he wouldn't keep it in a bank. He would hide it where no corporate auditor could find it."
They moved deeper into the labyrinth of storage rooms. Piles of broken furniture, water-damaged ledgers, and rusted iron tools littered the floor.
Suddenly, Thorne’s flashlight beam caught something glinting beneath a collapsed section of shelving.
"Hold on," Thorne muttered, kneeling down. He kicked aside a rotting wooden crate and exposed a heavy iron floor safe set directly into the concrete foundation. The dial had been violently drilled out with industrial tools, and the heavy steel door hung slightly ajar.
Warren stepped up beside him, shining his light directly into the open vault.
It was empty. The files had been stripped clean.
Except for a single, fluttering sheet of paper caught in the hinge of the steel door.
May you like
Warren reached down, carefully pulling the paper free. It was a photocopied land deed bearing an official county seal dated 1952—and attached to it was a handwritten memo signed by the original owner of Thornwood Manor, warning that the property’s ownership deed had been fraudulently altered to conceal millions in embezzled municipal funds.
And scrawled at the bottom of the memo, in fresh, hurried ink matching Elena Parker’s handwriting, was a single address: The old boathouse at the west pier. They're holding her there.
