Chapter 5 - THE ASHES OF THE CARRIAGE HOUSE
The gold lighter spun through the air in a slow, terrifying arc.
It didn't hit the straw.
Vincent lunged forward, swinging his wooden cane with every ounce of strength left in his battered body. He struck the lighter mid-air like a baseball. The brass Zippo deflected off the wood, clattered against the far brick wall, and went out in a puddle of cellar water.
Arthur cursed and reached into his coat for a gun, but Roman was already moving. Without firing a shot that could ignite the gas, Roman crossed the room in three long strides and slammed the heavy steel butt of his pistol across Arthur's jaw.
The seventy-year-old consigliere crumpled to the stone floor like an empty sack.
"The pilot light on the boiler!" Clara screamed over the deafening hiss of the broken gas pipe. "Roman, the water heater is behind the wine racks! In thirty seconds the gas will reach the flame!"
Roman didn't waste a breath. He yanked a folding pocketknife from his trousers, sliced through the thick plastic zip-ties binding Clara's wrists and ankles, and hauled her out of the chair.
"Go!" Roman shouted, shoving Vincent and Clara toward the iron cellar stairs. "Get Leo to the main house! Now!"
I turned and scrambled up the narrow stone steps with Leo clinging to my neck. Behind me, Vincent and Clara stumbled upward, holding each other up as the noxious smell of natural gas filled the stairwell.
When we burst through the service door into the cold October night air, I realized Roman wasn't behind us.
"Where's Roman?" I gasped, setting Leo down into Clara's trembling arms.
Through the shattered ground-level window of the carriage house, I saw Roman kneeling beside Arthur's unconscious body in the cellar. He wasn't saving the old man—he was ripping Arthur's charcoal overcoat open, frantically searching the inner pockets for the vineyard bearer bonds and the ledger pages before the room blew.
"Roman, get out of there!" Vincent yelled, limping back toward the iron grate.
A black SUV suddenly roared around the corner of the carriage house, its high beams blinding us. Marcus Vane was behind the wheel, and Cassandra sat in the passenger seat, her green silk dress torn at the shoulder.
Marcus saw Vincent standing near the cellar steps. His face twisted with pure hatred. Instead of driving toward the open front gates, Marcus cranked the steering wheel hard to the left and stomped on the accelerator, aiming the three-ton vehicle straight at Vincent, Clara, and little Leo.
"Daddy, look out!" Leo screamed.
Vincent couldn't run. His injured leg buckled on the wet cobblestone as he tried to shield Clara and the boy with his own body.
I didn't think about the bakery Roman had foreclosed on. I didn't think about the lies.
I saw a six-year-old boy who had just gotten his parents back, and I ran toward the stone retaining wall beside the driveway where the estate's heavy iron snowplow blade was propped up on wooden blocks for the winter.
With both hands, I grabbed the wooden chock holding the rusted half-ton iron blade and yanked it free with a desperate heave.
The heavy steel plow slid off the stone wall and crashed squarely onto the cobblestones directly in front of the speeding SUV.
Marcus didn't have time to swerve.
The front axle of the SUV slammed into the solid iron blade at forty miles an hour. The vehicle's front tires blew out with twin gunshots, the hood crumpled like tinfoil, and the SUV spun violently sideways—sliding straight into the brick support wall of the carriage house, right above the cellar window.
Bricks showered down. The impact ruptured the exterior electrical box in a shower of blinding blue sparks.
Down in the cellar, the leaking gas finally found its ignition.
BOOM.
A massive orange fireball erupted from the cellar windows, blowing the heavy oak doors off the carriage house and knocking me flat onto my back on the wet grass.
The heat scorched my face. My ears rang with a high, piercing whistle that drowned out the world.
Through the thick black smoke billowing across the lawn, I pushed myself up onto my elbows, coughing violently.
Twenty feet away, Vincent was shielding Clara and Leo behind the stone garden wall. They were safe.
The black SUV was wedged into the collapsing brick corner of the carriage house, its airbags deployed. The driver's side door kicked open, and Marcus stumbled out, blood streaming down his forehead, dragging a dazed, screaming Cassandra into the dark woods bordering the estate before the estate guards could reach the flames.
"Roman!" Vincent screamed, trying to crawl toward the burning cellar grate as a second smaller explosion shook the floorboards. "ROMAN!"
I scrambled to my feet, ignoring the sharp pain in my bruised ribs, and ran toward the iron cellar stairs. Black smoke poured out of the opening like a chimney.
"Mr. Moretti!" I screamed into the fire.
Nothing answered but the roar of collapsing timber.
Then, thirty yards down the hillside, the rusted wooden storm doors of the old underground wine tunnel—the drainage exit built into the garden slope—banged open from the inside.
Roman rolled out onto the wet grass, dragging Arthur Moretti by the collar of his scorched coat. Roman's tuxedo jacket was burned through at the shoulder, his face blackened with soot, and his right hand was clenched tightly around a half-burned leather packet.
I ran down the slope and dropped to my knees beside him just as he collapsed onto his back, gasping for clean air.
"You idiot!" I sobbed, hitting his uninjured chest with my fist before grabbing his soot-stained face in my hands. "You almost died for a stack of paper!"
Roman coughed, a ragged, painful sound, and held up the scorched leather packet. A fragile, handwritten medical chart with a Philadelphia hospital seal was tucked inside.
"Not for the bonds, Elena," Roman rasped, his dark eyes locking onto mine through the smoke. "I went back because Arthur had your father's real cardiology file from the clinic he bought. Look at the bottom line."
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My hands shook as I pulled the scorched paper free. In the orange glow of the burning carriage house, I read the doctor's notes dated four months ago.
My father didn't have terminal congestive heart failure. The medication I had been bankrupting myself to buy wasn't saving his life—it was a toxic beta-blocker compound slowly inducing the very symptoms we were trying to cure, prescribed by a clinic physician on the Vane family payroll to keep me trapped at the estate.
