Chapter 6 - THE TUNNEL BENEATH THE BATTERY
The air in the tunnel tasted of sulfur, sea salt, and two hundred years of river mud.
The ceiling wept cold condensation onto our shoulders as we stumbled through the gloom.
I led the way.
I held my phone in my left hand, its faint screen illuminating the cracked brick arches and rotting timber supports.
Behind me, Graham leaned heavily against the damp masonry.
His breathing was ragged.
Harsh.
A wet, whistling sound accompanied every inhalation.
The bullet had passed through his left tricep, but the shrapnel from the prep table had gouged a deep furrow across his ribs.
Blood was soaking through his black evening shirt, dripping steadily onto the wet ballast stones between his boots.
“How far... to the creek?” he rasped, his hand bracing against a slime-coated beam.
“Three hundred yards,” I answered, not slowing my pace.
“Near the old cotton dock.”
“Who... who showed you this passage, Eleanor?”
“Your father,” I said over my shoulder.
Graham stopped dead in the mud.
The silence of the cavern closed in around us, punctuated only by the distant, muffled thuds of Julian Vance’s men searching the cellar above.
“My father died before we married,” Graham choked out, his eyes wide in the faint blue glow of my phone.
“He died in this tunnel, Graham.”
I turned to face him.
The water was up to my ankles, freezing, numbing the cuts on my bare soles.
“He didn't die of a heart attack on the docks,” I said, the truth finally tearing free from the vault where I had kept it for seven years.
“He took four bullets to the chest down here, trying to smuggle the union ledgers away from the Commission.”
Graham’s face drained of what little color remained.
“You're lying.”
“I found him, Graham!” I whispered fiercely, stepping into his space.
“Seven years ago!”
“Three years after we married!”
“I was planting the hydrangeas near the carriage house when the brick foundation collapsed into this cellar!”
My voice shook with the weight of the secret that had rotted between us like gangrene.
“Your father was bleeding out against that very archway!”
“He held my wrist!”
“He told me that Marcus Kane and Julian Vance had ordered the hit because he wouldn't let them move heroin through the city freight lines!”
Graham sank against the brick wall, his knees buckling under the weight of the revelation.
He slid down until he was sitting in the cold sludge, clutching his bleeding side.
“He told you... and you never said a word to me?”
“He made me swear on his dying breath, Graham!”
I dropped to my knees in front of him, heedless of the mud ruining the navy silk of my anniversary dress.
“He told me that if you knew the truth back then, you would have marched into Vance’s compound with an open gun and been butchered before sunrise!”
“He made me promise to wait until you had enough power to destroy them without dying in the street!”
Tears burned my eyes, hot and bitter against the cold air.
“I spent seven years sitting across from Marcus Kane at our Sunday dinners!”
“I poured tea for Julian Vance while my skin crawled!”
“I built your social registry, I bribed the judges’ wives, I made sure every politician in the state attended our galas so nobody would dare touch you!”
I shoved his uninjured shoulder with both hands.
“And tonight, you stood in that lounge and told your cronies that I was a cheap investment!”
“That you wear that ring to make bankers trust you!”
Graham looked at me.
His dark eyes were hollowed out by agony, but behind the pain, a terrifying, shattering realization took hold.
He looked at my bleeding feet.
He looked at my torn silk dress.
He looked at my hand, raw and bruised from the recoil of the gun I had fired to save his life.
“Eleanor...” he whispered, his voice breaking down the middle.
“Don't touch me,” I spat, pulling my hands back.
From the tunnel mouth behind us, the beam of a high-powered tactical flashlight swept across the brick arches.
Boot steps splashed heavily through the standing water.
A voice echoed down the stone corridor:
“They went toward the river outlet!”
“Vance said bring the woman back alive!”
“Take the boss’s head for the mantle!”
Graham didn't hesitate.
He lunged upward from the mud, ignoring the agony tearing through his torn flesh.
He wrapped his good arm around my waist, lifting me out of the freezing water, and shoved me toward the rusty iron grating that opened into the marsh reeds fifty yards ahead.
“Run, Eleanor,” he commanded, his voice turning to pure, unyielding iron.
“I am not running without you, Graham!”
“I am the one they want dead!” he roared against the wind that was beginning to howl through the grating.
He drew his Kimber with a hand that did not shake.
He shoved me through the narrow breach in the iron bars into the tall, freezing grass of the riverbank.
“Go to the boat house,” he ordered, his eyes burning with an ancient, terrifying fire.
“If I don't reach you in ten minutes...”
He reached up with his left hand.
He pulled the platinum wedding band from his finger.
He pressed the cold, heavy metal into the center of my palm and closed my fingers over it.
“Throw it in the river,” he whispered.
May you like
“And never look back.”
Before I could scream, he slammed the iron grating shut between us and turned back into the darkness of the tunnel with his gun raised.
