Page 128 of The Beast Who Broke Me
My father was innocent.
What could possibly have made my father take the blame for the murder of a friend?Somethingstopped him from telling the truth. My grandmother found out what it was but couldn’t bring herself to write it down, even in a letter hidden inside a secret drawer that she never ended up giving to my father.
Whatever that reason was, it died with them.
I want to scream. I want to find Damiano Orsini and shove this letter in his face and say,Look. Look at what you did to me. Look at what you built your hatred on. A lie. A fucking lie, and I paid for it with my body and my freedom and my?—
But the fury, as real as it is, keeps colliding with something else.
A thirteen-year-old hiding behind a dumpster after his world ended. Everything that boy became—Enforcer, killer, the man who bought a Clemenza at auction to avenge a murdered father—all of it grew from the same poisoned root.
He was a victim of this lie, too.
I fold the letter along its original creases and slide it into my pocket. I don’t know what to do with this, and I’m too angry to think clearly right now, my head fogging up like it was after Damiano Orsini left me down here in the dark for three days.
I’m starting to feel claustrophobic. I head over to the mini-fridge to grab a bottle of water, because my throat is parched. But when I pass close to the dumbwaiter, I freeze.
I can smell smoke.
Not the warm, woody scent of the fireplace in the foyer. This is chemical and acrid, and when I pull up the cover of the dumbwaiter, I have to jerk back, coughing, my hand over my mouth.
The house is on fire.
For one second, I don’t move. Then the survival instinct kicks in.
I turn and bolt for the elevator, my feet slapping on the concrete, and slam my hand on the button—but there’s nothing. I hit it again and again, but it’s totally dead. The panel doesn’t light up, there’s no hum of the mechanisms engaging.
The power is out. The elevator runs on the house’s main electrical system, and if the fire has reached the electrical panel, the circuit is dead.
I claw at the doors with my fingers. Sealed. I’d need a crowbar, a pry bar, something metal with leverage.
I’m starting to panic, and I can’t panic. If I panic, I’ll die.
I force myself to think. This basement has no windows. No stairs. Dami designed it as a prison, and a prison it is. That elevator is the only way in or out, and if I can’t get it open?—
The dumbwaiter.
The same shaft that is currently funneling smoke down to me is the only other way out of this place. I run back over to it, and along with the smoke, I can feel air moving, a slight breeze on my skin, which means if I can get the cabinet out, I might be able to somehow get up the shaft and into the kitchen.
Which is, apparently, on fire. And the smoke will get worse the higher I get in the shaft.
But I have no other options. The only thing I have on my side at the moment is that the cabinet inside the dumbwaiter is made from wood, not metal, so it’s not heating up. It was probably part of the original house. I grab a bedpost finial I loosened earlier from my father’s bed, which has a long, thick metal screw at the base, and start bashing away at the dumbwaiter, trying to break through the cabinet.
The wood is soft, thank God. Pine or poplar, not oak. The first blow cracks the panel. The second opens a hole. I wrench sideways, tearing the cabinet apart piece by piece, pulling the splintered wood out with my hands. A sharp piece catches my palm and opens a gash that bleeds freely, but I barely feel it.
Behind the shattered cabinet, I can see the pulley system set into the wooden walls on either side, the tracks that guided thecabinet up and down. And at the very top of the shaft, an orange glow.
I’m going to be climbing into a blaze.
I strip off my shirt and damp it down, then wrap it around my nose and mouth. It helps a little with the smoke.
Then I climb into the shaft.
It’s narrow, but I’m still skinny enough to fit. I brace my feet against one wall and my back against the other and start to shuffle upward, inch by inch.
My hands are slick. Sweat from the heat and blood from the gash on my palm. They keep slipping, but each time I catch myself and keep climbing. After a few feet, I make the mistake of looking down. The basement is already far enough below that a fall would break something important.
I stop looking down.
