Chapter 4 - The Black Shaft
The thick smoke burned Norah's eyes and throat, forcing her to cough violently into the sleeve of her blouse.
Declan ripped a piece of fabric from his ruined shirt and handed it to her, ordering her to cover her mouth.
He pushed himself up against the mirrored wall, his face pale and covered in a cold, deadly sweat.
He told her she had to climb through the hatch alone and find a way to pry open the nearest floor doors.
Norah adamantly refused to leave him behind to die in the toxic, smoke-filled cage.
She grabbed his uninjured arm and draped it over her shoulder, acting as a human crutch for the massive billionaire.
She instructed him to step onto the handrail while she pushed him upward toward the opening.
Declan argued that he was too heavy, but the fierce determination in her eyes silenced his protests.
He gritted his teeth and stepped onto the rail, using his remaining strength to pull himself up through the narrow hatch.
He collapsed onto the dusty roof of the elevator cab, gasping for clean air in the dark shaft.
Norah quickly followed, using the discarded assault rifle to boost herself up through the opening.
She crawled onto the cold metal roof, finding Declan lying beside the dead mercenary he had just shot.
The elevator shaft was pitch black, a massive concrete void stretching endlessly above and below them.
A cold draft rushed past them, clearing some of the toxic smoke that continued to billow from the cab below.
Declan pointed upward to the faint outline of the large steel doors marking the twenty-seventh floor.
They were stranded exactly halfway between the cab roof and the floor ledge above them.
Norah realized they would have to jump and grab the greasy metal cables to hoist themselves up to the ledge.
Before they could formulate a plan to reach the doors, a massive mechanical clunk echoed from the top of the shaft.
The emergency brakes holding the elevator suddenly disengaged with a terrifying shriek of metal.
But the elevator did not plummet toward the basement as they had expected.
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The massive counterweights on the opposite side of the shaft had been deliberately severed by the hit squad.
The elevator cab suddenly shot violently upward toward the crushing gear wheels at the very top of the building.
