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 35 / 50

Chapter 35 - Blood in the Elevator Shaft

The elevator passed the 40th floor when the warning klaxons began to shriek.

A violent, screeching grind echoed through the shaft. Sparks showered down through the steel grating above our heads as emergency friction brakes engaged with bone-rattling force. The lift violently shuddered to a halt at the 52nd floor.

"Matteo!" Luca barked into his headset. "What happened?"

Static hissed, followed by Matteo’s panicked voice. *"They caught the buffer! The internal AI flagged the weight discrepancy! Luca, they’ve cut the main cables above you—"*

"Brace!" Luca screamed, tackling me to the floor of the cage.

*SNAP.*

A sound like artillery echoed above us as the primary hoisting cables severed. The lift plummeted.

My stomach leaped into my throat as gravity abandoned us. For three terrifying seconds, we were in freefall. Then, the secondary magnetic arresting calipers slammed against the vertical guide rails. The cage slammed into the reinforced walls with sickening violence, sending Dante and the other two men crashing into the steel mesh.

Metal warped. The lift dangled precariously, tilted at a thirty-degree angle over a five-hundred-foot drop into the black abyss of the shaft.

"Sophie! Are you hit?" Luca’s voice was frantic, his hands checking my shoulders, my neck, my chest.

"I’m whole!" I coughed, wiping blood from a shallow cut on my forehead. "We have to get out of this box before the secondary clamps snap!"

"Top hatch!" Dante grunted, coughing up blood from a cracked rib. "Move!"

Luca boosted me through the emergency hatch onto the roof of the elevator cab. The wind howling up the elevator shaft was freezing, smelling of ozone and burning brake pads. Above us, twenty floors up, the lights of the maintenance access platform glowed faintly.

Suddenly, the maintenance doors on the 55th floor slammed open directly above our heads.

Rifle barrels poked through the opening.

"Down!" I screamed, pulling Luca up by his vest just as a volley of automatic fire peppered the roof of the cab where he had been standing. Sparks exploded around us.

"Dante, suppressive fire!" Luca ordered, pulling an incendiary grenade from his belt.

Luca pulled the pin with his teeth, waited two agonizing seconds, and hurled it upward through the open shaft doors. An ear-shattering boom erupted above, accompanied by a blinding flash of white-hot phosphorous. The screams of the ambushers echoed down the concrete tube.

"Climb the maintenance ladder!" Luca shouted over the roar of flames. "Go! Go!"

We scrambled onto the steel rungs bolted to the shaft wall just as the secondary brakes gave out completely with a deafening groan.

Below us, the elevator cab ripped free from its tracks and plummeted into the darkness, crashing into the subterranean bedrock hundreds of feet below with a distant, thunderous explosion.