Chapter 11 - The Confrontation at Blackwood Estate
Gunfire erupted across the rooftop like rolling thunder.
Christopher returned fire from behind the steel air conditioning unit, pinning two of the mercenaries behind the brick elevator shaft.
"Penny! Cross the bridge! Now!" he screamed over the roar of the wind and gunfire.
I looked at the narrow steel maintenance bridge spanning the dizzying eight-foot gap between the two buildings. Below the steel grating lay an eight-hundred-foot drop straight down to the concrete alleyway.
Terror threatened to paralyze my legs.
“If you run now, you die. If you fight, you live,” I told myself.
I gripped the cold steel handrails, gritted my teeth, and sprinted across the vibrating metal grating. Wind roared in my ears, pulling at my clothes, but I kept my eyes fixed on the opposite roof.
I hit the gravel of the neighboring building’s roof, turned around, and saw Christopher sprinting toward the bridge.
One of the mercenaries stepped out from behind the elevator shaft, raising his rifle to take aim at Christopher’s back.
I looked down at the gravel at my feet. Beside the bridge anchor sat a heavy steel maintenance crowbar used to lock the bridge gate.
Without thinking, I grabbed the heavy crowbar, hooked it beneath the temporary emergency release lever of the bridge, and heaved upward with all my might.
Christopher dove forward, flying across the gap and landing hard on the gravel beside me just as the bridge’s locking pins snapped.
The heavy steel maintenance bridge broke loose from its hinges, swinging downward with a deafening screech of tearing metal, slamming flat against the brick facade of our building.
The mercenary on the other roof skidded to a halt at the edge of the parapet, his rifle aimed across empty air.
"Come on!" Christopher gasped, pulling me to my feet.
We kicked open the roof access door of the neighboring building, sprinted down the service stairs to the 12th floor, boarded an empty passenger elevator, and walked calmly out through the crowded lobby of the adjacent residential tower onto 7th Avenue.
Two minutes later, we melted into the bustling crowd of pedestrians, hailing a yellow cab heading toward the Lincoln Tunnel.
"Where are we going?" I asked, collapsing against the cab's vinyl seat, my hands trembling violently as I bandaged a deep scrape on Christopher’s forearm with my scarf.
"To the source of the rot," Christopher said, his eyes burning with cold, resolute determination. "To Lake Blackwood. To our father’s ancestral estate."
"The two hundred million in diamonds and bonds?" I asked.
"Gabriel Vance wants the Blackwood vault," Christopher said grimly. "He thinks he can force me to open it. What he doesn't know is that Father installed a fail-safe inside that vault thirty years ago. If the vault is breached using an unauthorized override, the entire subterranean complex incinerates itself."
Two hours later, under the cover of a pitch-black, moonless night, our taxi dropped us off two miles from the wrought-iron gates of the Blackwood Estate.
The estate was a sprawling, gothic stone mansion built in the 1920s, perched atop a granite cliff overlooking the black waters of the lake. It had stood abandoned for twenty years, shrouded in overgrown ivy, rusted iron fences, and dark legends of the Bennett family’s criminal origins.
We hiked through the dense pine forest, bypassing the main driveway where four black SUVs were parked with their engines idling.
Gabriel Vance was already inside.
Through the broken stained-glass windows of the mansion's ground floor, we could see flashlight beams sweeping across the grand ballroom.
Christopher led me to an overgrown cellar door hidden beneath the roots of an ancient weeping willow tree near the edge of the cliff. He pulled the rusted iron ring, opening a narrow stone staircase that descended into the subterranean foundation of the estate.
We descended into the pitch-black darkness, Christopher illuminating the damp stone corridor with his smartphone light.
At the end of the long tunnel stood a massive, six-foot-thick circular vault door made of reinforced bank-grade steel, bearing the engraved crest of the Bennett family: a coiled serpent grasping an hourglass.
Standing in front of the vault door was Gabriel Vance, flanked by four armed mercenaries.
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Gabriel was a man in his late fifties, with slicked-back silver hair, cold blue eyes, and an aristocratic arrogance that mirrored Christian's worst traits.
"I knew you would come, Christopher," Gabriel said smoothly, turning around to face us as our footsteps echoed on the stone floor. "A Bennett always returns to his gold."
