Chapter 4 - The Women Buried Alive
The key lay in my palm, cold and small and impossibly heavy.
Ward C-19.
That was the only marking etched into the metal.
Tomas saw it and swore softly. “I thought that wing was closed.”
“It isn’t,” I said.
My father’s note had included just seven words beneath the address line:
If I fail, find the women first.
We didn’t go toward the stairwell.
We ran deeper into the basement.
Behind us, Hale’s men hit the archive corridor with enough force to rattle the steel grates. Tomas guided me through a maze of service passages until we reached a corridor that looked older than the rest of Blackridge—paint peeling from concrete, old hospital signage half-removed, one flickering bulb stuttering above a locked reinforced door.
C-19.
I shoved the key in.
It turned.
The door opened into a hidden ward.
Not abandoned.
Occupied.
The air inside smelled stale, medicated, and tragically human. Six rooms lined the hall. In three, women lay on beds staring at the ceiling. In another, an elderly woman sat wrapped in a blanket, rocking silently. In the last room, a younger woman rose halfway from a chair, eyes terrified and confused.
She looked at me as if she had forgotten how hope worked.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
Before I could answer, the older woman in the blanket lifted her face toward me.
And I stopped breathing.
I knew that face from old family photographs.
My aunt Eleanor.
Older. Hollowed. But alive.
“Aunt Eleanor?” I whispered.
She stared at me for a long second. Then tears filled her eyes.
“Rose’s daughter,” she said weakly, using my father’s pet name for me. “He told me someone would come.”
My father had known.
He had hidden the key because he couldn’t free them alone.
Tomas was already checking rooms. “Three are sedated. One can walk. The others need help.”
Down the corridor behind us, a loudspeaker cracked to life.
“All unauthorized personnel report to central intake. Basement sectors are under containment.”
My mother’s voice followed, calm and poisonous.
“Evelyn, if you surrender now, I can still protect you from what Victor is prepared to say about your mental condition.”
I almost laughed.
Even now, she thought language could rebuild her power.
I looked at my aunt. “Can you walk?”
“With help.”
I tucked my father’s file under my arm, passed the USB drive into my cardigan pocket, and met Tomas’s eyes.
“We take them out.”
He nodded.
But before we could move, the younger woman in the chair grabbed my wrist.
“There’s another room,” she said hoarsely. “At the end. They keep records there. And one more patient.”
I looked toward the shadowed final door.
No label. No window.
Just a deadbolt.
“Who?” I asked.
Her lips trembled.
“The first wife.”
At first I didn’t understand.
Then I did.
And when I did, the blood in my veins turned to ice.
Because the file in my hands wasn’t just about missing women.
It was about men too.
Powerful men.
May you like
Protected men.
And somewhere inside Blackridge, one of them had hidden the wife everyone believed was dead.
