Free Web NovelChapter 160: Chapter One Hundred-Sixty: The Undead
//CLARA//
Stupid.
Catastrophically stupid.
I hauled my coat tighter around my shoulders, my boots slipping over another patch of dark, slick ice near the edge of the wharf.
Why didn’t you just ask him? I demanded of myself, glaring into the heavy, salt-crusted mist hanging over the docks.
Hey, Casimir, quick question before breakfast, are you a serial killer or the target of one? Pass the jam, please.
But my tongue had turned to lead the second his hands left my waist. It was easy to be brave when he wasn’t looking through me with those cold, gray eyes that seemed to count the beats of my pulse.
Facing a midnight corridor filled with shadows was terrifying. Facing Casimir with the truth was entirely out of the question.
Now I have no idea what I’m diving into, what danger I’m putting myself in, or whether anyone even knows I’m gone.
I don’t even know what I’m looking for.
The sun hadn’t bothered to show, leaving the sky a bruised, metallic purple that leaked miserable frost onto the docks. The scent of dead fish, coal tar, and low tide choked the air, burning the back of my throat with every shallow breath.
I checked the crumpled scrap of stationery in my fist again, my eyes scanning the faded, salt-bleached wooden facades of the structures lining the slip.
"Pier 14," I muttered, pulling my cloak tighter against the biting wind. "Slip 2. Warehouse 33. This is either the location of answers or the location of my murder. Fifty-fifty odds, really."
The small side door hung off its top hinge, leaving a jagged, vertical smile of pitch-black interior exposed to the pier. ƒrēewebnovel.com
The windows were boarded up, their doors streaked with rust, their walls tagged with chalk marks I couldn’t read. Slip 2 was a narrow channel between two crumbling docks, the water black and oily, lapping against the pilings with a sound like wet kisses.
"Perfect," I muttered, my voice cracking in the frost. "An open invitation to a crime scene. Don’t mind if I do."
I slipped inside, the heavy scent of old canvas, machine oil, and decaying parchment hitting me like a wall.
It was a cavernous, frozen tomb. High above, cracked skylight glass rattled under the wind, casting long, sharp fingers of gray morning light into the labyrinth of shipping crates.
I struck a match against the rough brick wall. The flare caught the wick of the small iron lantern I’d smuggled from the vestibule, sending a warm, nervous amber glow dancing across the floorboards.
"Okay, investigative journalism 101," I whispered, holding the light higher as my boots echoed hollowly against the beams. "Where do the psychopaths keep the evidence?"
I pushed deeper into the rows, the shadows stretching and warping against the ceiling like giant, reaching hands.
Near the back of the warehouse, the neat rows of cargo gave way to chaos. Heavy crates had been violently dragged aside, broken open, and stacked to form a makeshift barrier around a central clearance.
In the middle of the empty space sat a heavy, scarred oak desk. It was absolutely buried under a blizzard of papers.
"Jackpot," I breathed, setting the lantern down on the edge of the wood.
I pulled the first stack toward me, my eyes skipping over columns of newsprint. Cutouts from the Tribune and the Times, spanning three years, lay in neat chronological order. Thick, aggressive lines of black ink scored through the paragraphs.
GUGGENHEIM EXPANSION PACES HUDSON LINE. MYSTERIOUS BLAZE AT RIVAL DOCKYARD LEAVES TWO DEAD. THURSTON HOLDINGS DECLARED BANKRUPTCY.
"A scrapbook of ruin," I murmured, flipping a page. "Did you do this, Casimir? Or did someone just like keeping score?" ƒгeewebnovёl.com
Beneath the clippings lay hand-drawn blueprints.
I smoothed the crinkled linen out, tracing the sharp, geometric ink lines. It wasn’t a house or a railway network. It was a meticulously detailed layout of the underground brick vaults beneath the Wall Street banking district.
Red ink ran across the access shafts, intersected by dates that made my stomach drop. Every single date matched a transaction from the ledger I’d hidden under my mattress.
"A heist map? A security audit?"
I slammed my palms against my temples, the pressure in my head building into a throb.
"No. No, it doesn’t make sense. Why would a man who owns the railroads need to tunnel under a bank?"
I shuffled through the mess, grabbing letters, cargo manifests, and legal receipts.
Bartholomew Vanderbilt’s arrogant, sweeping signature stared back at me from three separate letters addressed to William Cuthbert.
...we must neutralize the Guggenheim leverage before the winter thaw, Bartholomew had written. The keystone project at the port will render his lines obsolete. See to it the cargo is contained.
"Contain the cargo," I repeated, my eyes darting to a different stack of notes right next to the letters.
These weren’t written in Bartholomew’s elegant script. The handwriting here was tiny, geometric, and perfectly precise.
Target tracking secure. Subject exhibits high threshold for violence. Vulnerability identified, V.
"V," I whispered, my fingers tightening on the edge of the desk. "Vanderbilt? Who is V?"
I started shuffling the pages faster, the paper rustling loudly in the dead silence of the warehouse. The correlations were a jumbled, maddening loop.
One page clearly outlined Casimir as the head of the entire syndicate, tracing every illegal dock shipment and political bribe straight back to his personal ledger. But the very next page—formatted like a military hit dossier—tracked his daily carriage routes, his guard rotations at the mansion, and the exact blind spots in his study windows.
"You’re the boss," I said to the empty desk, my breath fogging over the ink. "But you’re also the target. How can you be both? Are you running this nightmare, or are they just waiting for you to walk into a corner?"
The pieces were scattered across the wood, refusing to snap into a shape my brain could comprehend. Every line that proved his guilt was tied to a document that proved someone was trying to destroy him. A predator in a cage built by his own prey.
"Think, damn it," I hissed, scattering a handful of receipts. "There’s a missing variable here. What did Elias leave behind?"
Clank.
I froze. My hand hovered over the blueprints, the paper trembling slightly against my fingertips.
Clank. Drag. Clank.
The sound was low, metallic, and heavy, echoing from behind a wall of stacked burlap sacks at the far, dark end of the clearance.
It was followed by a wet, ragged, whistling wheeze that sounded like air being forced through a broken pipe.
My heart gave a violent kick against my ribs. Every survival instinct I had inherited or acquired told me to drop the lantern, run out the door, and never look back.
"Is someone there?" I called out, the words sounding horribly small and reedy in the massive space.
The wheezing stopped for a beat. Then, a sharp, frantic rattle of iron chains shattered the quiet.
I didn’t run. I couldn’t.
The stubborn, stupid, reckless streak that had gotten me into this century in the first place took hold of my boots. I picked up the lantern, its amber light swinging wildly, casting monstrous, distorted shadows against the brickwork as I forced myself toward the burlap partition.
I shoved a heavy sack aside, lifting the lantern into the darkness of the hidden alcove. The light spilled over the floorboards, reflecting off massive iron rings bolted directly into the stone foundation.
My breath completely died in my throat.
Chained to the wall, bolted by thick, rusted industrial cuffs around his swollen wrists and bare ankles, was a man.
He was wearing the filthy, shredded remnants of a heavy wool coat, the fabric caked in dried mud, rust, and dark, stiffened blood.
His hair was a matted, bloody nest hanging over his face, hiding his features, but his skin was a sickening, translucent gray mapped with deep, infected lacerations and purple bruising.
He looked exactly like the man I’d found locked behind the red door at the Velvet Noose. Kept. Broken. Hidden away from the world like a dirty secret. But also entirely different.
At the sound of my boots, the man slowly, agonizingly hoisted his head. The movement caused the heavy chains to groan against the iron bolts with a deafening clank.
He dragged a fistful of matted hair away from his eyes, squinting blindly against the sudden glare of my lantern.
The warehouse tilted. I had to slam my free hand against a wooden support beam to keep my knees from buckling entirely.
It was impossible.
No... No. No, no.
It was a sick, twisted trick of the shadows.
Casimir had shot him. I had heard the gun go off in the fog. I had seen the blood on the deck. Casimir had looked me in the eye and told me the man was dead.
How—
The prisoner stared up at me, his cracked, bleeding lips peeling back into a hollow, terrifyingly familiar grin that showed broken, blackened teeth.
"Well, well," Silas Thurston wheezed, his voice a low, gravelly scrape that sounded like death itself.
"Look what... look what the cat dragged in. Hello again... Miss Thorne."
