Chapter 5 - The Basement Under the Villa
We had less than a minute.
Noah shoved the photo into my hand and pointed to the bed.
“Get back under the blanket. Act half-asleep. I’ll hide.”
“There’s no time.”
“There is if they still think you’re blind.”
That was the only reason I was alive.
I slipped into bed just as a knock came.
The red-lipped woman entered without waiting for permission.
Noah had vanished into the bathroom again.
She crossed the room and stood beside me.
“Did you take your soup?”
I let my gaze drift toward the ceiling.
“Not yet.”
She set something on the nightstand.
A small white pill.
“You’ve been so anxious lately, Ella. This will help you sleep.”
My pulse hammered.
Drugged tea. Now pills.
“I’m okay,” I said.
Her smile flattened for the first time.
“No,” she said softly. “You’re not.”
Then footsteps sounded behind her.
The man with my father’s voice stepped into the room.
For one horrible second, I thought we were finished.
But he said, “The courier’s here.”
The woman looked irritated.
“Fine. Give her ten minutes.”
They left together.
Noah emerged instantly.
“We go now.”
We slipped through the bathroom, down a servant’s staircase, and into the east wing. The villa was older than I had imagined, with narrow corridors hidden behind decorative walls. Someone had designed it for privacy a long time ago. These people had turned that privacy into a prison.
At the end of the east hall, the brass key opened a narrow door leading downstairs.
The basement smelled like damp stone and bleach.
I wish I could say I prepared myself for what I found.
I hadn’t.
My parents were there.
Alive.
Locked inside a converted wine cellar.
My mother burst into tears the moment she saw me looking at her.
“You can see.”
My father gripped the bars so hard his knuckles blanched.
“Don’t let them know,” he said immediately.
Even now.
Even after everything.
Noah forced the lock with a tire iron he’d hidden nearby, and we pulled them out one by one.
My mother clung to me, shaking.
My father grabbed my shoulders.
“They need your signature,” he said. “Guardianship papers. Transfer documents. They wanted us to say you were deteriorating. When we refused, they locked us down here and brought in those two.”
“Who are they?”
“Actors at first,” my father said bitterly. “Or that’s what we thought. Professional identity thieves. Hired faces.”
“By who?”
My father looked at Noah.
Then at me.
And the answer landed before he spoke it.
“Your cousin Lydia.”
I went cold.
Lydia Mercer.
My aunt’s daughter.
The woman who had spent years smiling through family dinners while quietly resenting the fact that my grandmother favored me.
“She’s been working with the company’s interim CFO,” my father said. “If they prove you’re incompetent, they get access through emergency board control.”
Noah cursed under his breath.
That was when we heard footsteps above us.
Not one person.
Several.
May you like
Too late.
They knew.
