Chapter 8 - The Hidden Room
The red laser sights of the mercenaries' rifles danced terrifyingly across Elena's chest and face.
She instinctively crouched low, using the heavy wooden chair holding Victor as a desperate shield.
"Do not move, or we will shoot you both!" the lead mercenary commanded aggressively from the bottom of the stairs.
Victor, who had been completely unresponsive, suddenly twitched his fingers with immense effort.
The paralytic toxin was slowly beginning to wear off, giving him a tiny fraction of his motor skills back.
He weakly raised his hand and pressed a hidden panel disguised as a decorative molding on the hallway wall.
The wall instantly hissed and slid open, revealing a heavily fortified steel panic room.
Elena quickly shoved the heavy chair inside and dove through the opening just as a hail of bullets shattered the plaster behind her.
The massive steel door slammed shut and locked automatically, plunging them into absolute, impenetrable silence.
Elena collapsed on the floor, gasping for air while clutching her throbbing, bloody shoulder.
The panic room was brightly lit and fully stocked with emergency medical supplies, communication gear, and a massive computer terminal.
Victor painfully opened his mouth and managed to speak in a raspy, incredibly weak whisper.
"Log into the master terminal, my thumbprint is not required for the internal secure server," Victor instructed slowly.
Elena scrambled to the desk and rapidly typed in the emergency override commands Victor quietly fed to her.
The large monitors on the wall flickered to life, displaying a highly encrypted, secret cloud backup of the entire estate's security system.
"Sylvia thought she destroyed the only copy, but she did not know about my private offshore server," Victor explained.
Elena pulled up the patio footage from earlier that evening, finally possessing the irrefutable proof of Sylvia's horrific crime.
As she continued to scan the other camera feeds, she clicked on an archived video from the kitchen taken just hours ago.
The footage clearly showed Sylvia pouring the deadly paralytic poison into Victor's evening tea.
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But the camera also captured exactly who had handed Sylvia the vial of poison in the first place.
It was Marcus, the very same man who was currently holding baby Leo outside in the dark.
