Chapter 6 - The Labyrinth of Secrets
Jax ascends the grand staircase with swift, silent steps, his eyes darting across every doorframe and dark alcove. Behind him, down in the foyer, Leo sits quietly on the leather bench, clutching Maya tightly under the heavy black leather jacket, his eyes wide as he listens to the heavy footsteps above.
The upper corridor of Blackwood Manor is lined with expensive oil paintings depicting historical medical procedures—eighteenth-century anatomists standing around dissecting tables, early surgical instruments laid out on velvet cloths, and dark portraits of the Vance ancestral line staring down with cold, unblinking eyes.
The air up here is suffocatingly warm, thick with the smell of antiseptics, rubbing alcohol, and something far more sinister: the distinct, metallic odor of fresh blood.
Jax reaches the heavy double doors at the end of the hall. Unlike the rest of the house’s grand mahogany woodwork, these doors are clad in brushed steel, secured by an electronic keypad lock that blinks with a steady, red standby light.
Jax looks at the keypad. He doesn't know the code, and he doesn't have time to search the fallen guards for a keycard.
He steps back, raising his heavy steel breaker bar, and thrusts the flat end straight into the narrow gap between the double doors near the magnetic lock housing. He plants his boot against the wall, leaning his full body weight into the steel lever.
The metal groans under the extreme torque. Screws pop inside the frame like tiny firecrackers. With a final, violent shudder, the magnetic lock shears away from the wall, and the heavy doors swing open into the dark room beyond.
Jax steps over the threshold, his breaker bar raised, his senses on high alert.
The room is not an office or a bedroom. It is a fully equipped, high-tech surgical theater hidden within the wooden walls of the nineteenth-century manor. Stainless steel counters line the perimeter, holding rows of gleaming scalpels, bone saws, intravenous drips, and complex monitoring equipment. Overhead, a massive round surgical lamp casts an intense, sterile white light onto an operating table in the center of the room.
Bound to the surgical table by heavy leather restraints at her wrists and ankles is a woman in her late twenties. Her dark hair is wild and matted with sweat, her face pale, thin, and bruised. She is dressed in a thin cotton hospital gown, her breathing fast and ragged, her brown eyes wide with a terrifying mixture of madness and exhaustion.
May you like
Her name is Clara—Leo and Maya’s mother.
Standing over her, dressed in a spotless white surgical coat over a dark wool suit, holding a long glass syringe filled with a thick, amber fluid, is Dr. Arthur Vance.
