Chapter 3 - The Flight through the Gallery
The darkness that followed the destruction of the lamp was total, save for the spastic, blue-white flashes of lightning that illuminated the room through the sheer curtains every three seconds. In those brief, strobe-like intervals, Fiona moved with the frantic, calculated agility of a creature fighting for its life.
She didn't run for the hallway door; Reed was blocking it with his massive frame and his syringe. Instead, she drove the heavy brass base of the lamp forward into the center of Dr. Reed’s chest. The impact was a dull, wet thump, followed by a sharp intake of air as the physician gasped, his silver glasses flying off his face and shattering against the marble floor.
"Grab her!" Victoria shrieked in the dark, her silk robe rustling as she lunged toward the sound of the collision.
Fiona didn't stay to find out if Victoria's fingers could find her clothing. She turned toward the dressing room door, her soft shoes gripping the polished hardwood floorboards as she bolted through the archway. As she passed the secret wardrobe cupboard, she caught a glimpse of Arthur's pale, terrified face staring out through the crack in the wooden slats.
"Stay," she hissed in the dark, not stopping for a fraction of a second. She needed to draw them away from the dressing room. She needed them to think she was running for the main staircase.
She burst through the rear door of the dressing room into the long, vaulted portrait gallery that formed the spine of the mansion's east wing. The gallery was over a hundred feet long, its walls lined with the dark oil paintings of previous Costello generations—men with hard, unforgiving jaws and women with cold, aristocratic eyes who looked down at her through the gloom.
The lightning flashed again, casting thirty-foot shadows of Fiona across the oriental runners. Behind her, the dressing room door crashed open, and the heavy, uncoordinated footsteps of Dr. Reed echoed through the corridor.
"She’s in the gallery!" Reed shouted, his voice cracking with a high-pitched, desperate terror. "She has the scanner records from my bag! If she gets to a phone with external service, we’re finished!"
Fiona reached the end of the gallery, her breath coming in hot, painful gasps that burned her throat. The main staircase was straight ahead, but she could see the bright flashlights of the night guards moving across the glass foyer downstairs. Victoria had already alerted them via her internal intercom.
"Security! There is an intruder in the east wing!" a voice boomed from the grand staircase below.
Fiona turned to her left, shoving open a narrow, unmarked door that led to the old service stairs—a spiral stone labyrinth built for the servants of the 1920s who kept the house running without being seen. The air inside the stairwell was cold and smelled of dust and old lime. She scrambled down the stone steps in the pitch black, her hands scraping against the rough masonry walls until her fingers were raw and bleeding.
She reached the ground floor basement level, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. The basement of the Costello estate wasn't a standard cellar; it was a vast, subterranean complex of brick arches, old wine vaults, and the massive mechanical heart of the mansion’s industrial heating system.
She stopped in the shadow of a large copper boiler, her breath ragged, her ears straining for the sound of pursuit. Above her, the stone steps groaned as the heavy combat boots of the guards began their descent.
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Fiona reached into her cardigan pocket, her fingers brushing the cold, sharp edges of the rusted needles wrapped in the blue towel. She still had the evidence. She had the proof that would destroy Victoria and Reed, but she was trapped thirty feet beneath a fortress with no cellular service and a dozen armed men hunting her down like an animal.
Suddenly, a hand reached out from the darkness behind the boiler and clamped firmly over her mouth.
