Chapter 4 - The Echoes in the Dark
Damian burst through the smoke and flames, coughing violently, his dark overcoat torn and singed by the blast. Leo scrambled over to him, helping him to his feet.
"Boss! Are you alright?!" Leo yelled over the ringing in his ears.
"I'm fine!" Damian barked, wiping soot and blood from his cheek. "Get the tech team on the line now!"
Damian grabbed his radio, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The destruction of the warehouse didn't phase him, but Julian's words echoed in his mind like a death sentence.
Somewhere cold. Somewhere deep. Somewhere where no one can hear her bleed.
"Tech, talk to me!" Damian shouted into the microphone. "Did you trace the signal from that speaker?!"
"We picked up a secondary radio frequency during the broadcast, Mr. Russo," the specialist replied over the comms. "It wasn't a landline. It was a short-wave marine radio transmission."
Damian's eyes narrowed. "Marine radio? He's on the water?"
"No, sir. The signal bounced off an old relay tower near the iron foundry in the industrial district of Staten Island. There’s an old underground utility network beneath the old brick factory near the harbor."
Damian's mind raced. The old Staten Island foundry had been sealed fifteen years ago after a chemical spill. It had three subterranean levels—flooded, freezing, and cut off from all cellular networks.
"The old cooling cellars," Damian realized, a cold wave of terror washing through his veins. "The sub-basements are forty feet below sea level. The water temperature down there stays just above freezing."
He remembered the blood on the kitchen island in Khloe's apartment. If she was wounded, and left in an unheated subterranean vault in the middle of a November rainstorm...
"Leo, assemble everyone," Damian said, his voice dropping into a terrifyingly quiet register. "We have less than an hour before hypothermia or blood loss takes her."
Meanwhile, forty feet beneath the rusted ruins of the Staten Island foundry, Khloe Hayes slowly opened her eyes.
Darkness surrounded her—thick, heavy, and absolute.
She was lying on a freezing, damp concrete floor. Her hands were bound behind her back with heavy plastic zip-ties, and a deep, throbbing ache burned in her right shoulder where Julian's gunman had struck her with the butt of a revolver during the abduction.
The air was bitterly cold, smelling of rust, wet moss, and salt water. Every breath she took burned her lungs like liquid ice.
"Damian..." she whispered, her voice cracking in the dark cellar.
She shifted her body, pain shooting up her spine. She could hear the slow, steady drip of cold water echoing from the ceiling into a pool somewhere nearby.
Footsteps echoed from a steel staircase at the far end of the long stone hallway outside her iron cell door.
A heavy latch slid back with a sickening, rusty screech.
A lantern flickered to life, revealing the scarred, gaunt face of Julian Vance standing in the doorway. He held a glass of dark whiskey in one hand and a revolver in the other.
"Waking up, Miss Hayes?" Julian sneered, stepping into the damp cell. "I must apologize for the accommodations. Damian usually keeps you in climate-controlled luxury, doesn't he?"
Khloe glared at him through the darkness, pulling herself up against the cold brick wall despite the agonizing pain in her shoulder.
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"Damian will find you," Khloe said, her voice steady despite her trembling body. "And when he does, he will tear you apart."
Julian laughed—a dry, hollow sound that echoed off the damp stone walls. "Damian is currently sifting through the burning rubble of a meatpacking plant in Brooklyn. He thinks you're dead, my dear. And by the time he realizes where you actually are... he will be far too late."
