Chapter 7 - The Blaze in the West Wing
The silence did not last.
Above us, the muffled screams of dozens of people began to reverberate through the floorboards.
Although Marcus had severed the primary detonation conduit to the south carriage house, the electrical short from the blown auxiliary lines had sparked an uncontrolled structural fire in the old servants' quarters of the west wing.
Smoke—thick, oily, and smelling of burning antique pine and horsehair insulation—began to pour through the ventilation grates into the cellar.
"Get up," I told Fiona, struggling to my feet using the edge of the industrial battery rack.
My dress was ruined, soaked with sweat and dust, and the contractions were now crashing over me in three-minute waves. The baby had dropped; I could feel the intense, relentless pressure in my pelvis. I didn't need a medical degree to know that my daughter was coming tonight, whether we were in a sterile operating room or the snow-covered driveway of a burning mansion.
Fiona didn't move. She sat against the fuel tank, her head slumped against her chest, her diamond choker smeared with grease and soot. "Leave me," she whispered, her voice hollowed out. "It’s over anyway."
"I'm not leaving you to die a martyr, Fiona," I snapped, grabbing the collar of her designer gown with one hand and hauling her upward with the unyielding strength that only mothers in crisis possess. "You’re going to prison. You’re going to sit in a federal penitentiary for the next thirty years and watch every single dollar you stole get returned to the people you ruined. Walk. Now."
I shoved her toward the stairs leading back up to the main hall.
When we reached the top of the cellar stairs and pushed through the heavy wooden door into the pantry, the heat hit us like a wall.
The entire west wing was an inferno. Flames were licking through the ceiling joists of the grand gallery, turning multi-million-dollar oil paintings into curling sheets of black ash. The smoke was hanging four feet from the floor, a toxic blanket of gray and black that burned the eyes and stripped the throat raw.
"Serena!"
Through the haze of smoke, a figure came stumbling toward us.
It was Matthias.
His tuxedo jacket was gone, his white dress shirt blackened with soot, his hair singed. In his hands, he was clutching a heavy leather briefcase—his personal safe contents, his passports, his emergency bearer bonds. Even with his ancestral home collapsing in flames, Matthias Dre had prioritized his paper wealth over human lives.
"You're alive!" he cried, dropping the briefcase onto the smoke-charred floor and reaching for me. "Serena, thank God! The north conservatory doors were jammed, but Marcus Vance broke through the glass from the outside! Everyone’s getting out onto the lawn!"
He looked down and saw Fiona, her hands zip-tied, her face bruised and bloody.
"Fiona..." Matthias stammered, his eyes darting between us. "Did she... did she have the records? Did you get the hard drive from her bag?"
I looked at my husband—the man I had sworn to love, the man who had promised to protect me—and felt nothing. Not rage. Not heartbreak. Just the cold, sterile pity one feels for a rabid dog that must be put down.
"That's what you care about, Matthias?" I coughed, the smoke tearing through my lungs. "The hard drive?"
"Serena, you don't understand!" he yelled, grabbing my shoulders with frantic desperation. "If that drive falls into federal hands, Hensley’s shell corporations are tied directly to my personal accounts! The SEC will freeze everything! We’ll lose the house in Nantucket, the trust funds, the private accounts—we’ll have nothing left for the baby!"
"There is no *we*, Matthias," I said, slapping his hands off my shoulders with a force that made him recoil. "And you will never touch a single penny that belongs to my daughter."
A terrifying groan echoed through the mansion as the main oak support beam of the second-floor gallery cracked under the intense heat. A shower of sparks and flaming plaster cascaded down into the foyer, landing directly on the enormous Norwegian spruce.
The Christmas tree, dried out from three weeks inside the heated house, ignited like a Roman candle. A fifty-foot pillar of flame roared toward the vaulted ceiling, consuming the silver ribbons, the antique glass ornaments, and the Dre family crest in a blinding, deafening vortex of fire.
"Move!" Marcus Vance’s voice bellowed through the smoke.
He appeared through the shattered remains of the front entryway, soot-stained, carrying a heavy fire axe in one gloved hand. He grabbed Fiona by the arm with one hand and wrapped his other arm securely around my waist, lifting half my weight off my trembling legs.
"The roof is coming down!" Marcus shouted. "Out! Everyone out!"
Matthias scrambled to grab his leather briefcase from the floor, his fingers desperately clutching the handle as he turned to follow us.
"Leave the bag, Matthias!" I screamed over the roar of the blaze.
He didn't listen. Greed was the only compass Matthias Dre had ever followed, and he followed it straight toward the burning doorway.
Just as he reached the threshold of the foyer, the second-floor mezzanine collapsed.
A massive, flaming beam of structural timber crashed down like a falling guillotine, smashing directly into Matthias’s path. The concussive blast of falling masonry and burning pine threw Matthias backward across the marble floor. The leather briefcase flew from his grip, landing directly in the heart of the inferno, where the paper bonds and offshore account ledgers ignited in a blinding flash of yellow light.
Matthias screamed—not from physical pain, but from the agony of watching his entire empire turn to ash in less than three seconds.
May you like
Marcus hauled Fiona and me through the shattered front entrance into the blinding, freezing gale of the Greenwich blizzard, dragging us away from the dying monster behind us.
***
