Vanessa claimed Sophie injured herself on a garage door, until Luca noticed the blood, the wheelchair, and one terrified look that told him his mother was missing. / Chapter 21 / 50

Chapter 21 - The Sixty-Second Echo

"Sixty seconds," Mateo’s voice repeated, chillingly light, as if he were reminding us of an appointment rather than sentencing the estate—and Luca’s mother—to an incinerating grave. "Fifty-eight now. Run along, boss. Let's see if your Kevlar can outpace thermite."

The line snapped dead. Static roared in my ear like a tidal wave.

"Mother!" Luca roared, his hands tearing at the tactical console mounted to Julian’s desk. "Elena! Disengage the elevator! Get to the blast shelter beneath the conservatory!"

"Luca..." Elena’s voice was faint, swallowed by the screech of metal rending miles away through the open frequency. "The locks... he corrupted the central overrides. The doors are sealing from the outside."

"No!" Luca’s face transformed into a mask of feral, breathless terror. The terrifying, unflinching Don of the Moretti syndicate vanished, replaced in an instant by a son staring into the abyss of his mother’s murder. He slammed his fist into the console, cracking the tempered glass. "Override code! Julian, give me the primary bypass or I swear to God I will peel the skin from your bones while you breathe!"

Julian lay slumped against the vault door, blood foaming at the corners of his mouth. A grotesque, triumphant grin stretched across his teeth. "You think... Mateo gave me the abort codes? You fool... we were both just his cleanup crew..."

"Thirty seconds," I breathed, watching the digital chronometer on Julian's decrypted terminal rapidly ticking backward.

My hands moved before my conscious mind could fully process the terror paralyzing my throat. My sister was alive. *My sister.* The girl whose screams I had heard in my nightmares for ten long years while smoke choked my lungs. But if we didn't save Elena right now, there would be no one left to avenge, no home to return to, and Luca would be broken beyond repair.

"Luca, look at me!" I shouted, grabbing the lapels of his heavy tactical coat and forcing his wild, bloodshot eyes to meet mine. "The storm drainage culvert! The old irrigation pipe beneath the east rose bed—the one we mapped when Vanessa tried to flood the lower wing!"

Luca blinked, the fog of panic cleaving against the sharp blade of my voice. "The manual pressure release valve."

"It vents the lower sub-levels into the reservoir!" I screamed into my comms. "Elena! Elena, can you hear me? Drag yourself to the laundry chute in the corridor! The drop leads straight to the cistern! Don't look back, don't grab the chair—just drop!"

"Sophie..." Elena gasped. The sound of shuddering concrete rattled through the earpiece. "I can't... my legs..."

"You crawled through broken glass to save Luca when he was seven years old, Elena!" I cried out, tears burning my eyes as the timer hit fifteen seconds. "Crawl! For your son! Crawl!"

A ragged sob tore from Elena over the comms, followed by the wet, scraping sound of fabric and fingernails dragging desperately against marble floorboards.

"Ten," Luca whispered, his knuckles white, holding the comms unit so tightly against his ear the plastic groaned. "Nine... eight..."

"I'm at the chute," Elena choked out. "God forgive me—"

A deafening, catastrophic roar tore through the frequency. The sound was so violent, so concussive, that the audio signal blew out into a high-pitched, screeching whine before plunging into utter, terrifying silence.

"Mother?" Luca whispered into the dead air.

Nothing. Just the low hum of the fluorescent lights above us and the dying rattle of Julian’s breath on the floor.