Free Web NovelChapter 48: Chapter 48 Bring everyone
_Rowena’s POV_
I went back at two in the morning.
Velvet wanted to come. I told her no, which she accepted, thankfully. Kasper was a harder conversation, he wanted to come, had reasons that were tactically sound, and was not the kind of man who accepted no without a counteroffer.
“If I’m not back by four,” I said, “then you come. With people.”
He looked at me for a long moment. “Three-thirty,” he said.
“Fine.”
So I went alone.
The southern quarter was quieter at this hour, not empty, cities were never empty, but reduced to its skeleton. Delivery vehicles and the occasional late workers,. I parked two streets over and went the rest of the way on foot, moving along the building’s eastern wall where the security camera coverage had a gap I had identified that afternoon.
The fire door on the lower level had a standard electronic lock.
It also had, I had noticed during the tour, a seal along the bottom edge that had been replaced recently, a new rubber against old metal, a detail that meant the door had been accessed frequently enough to wear out the original.
“Two people are inside the lower floor,” Kyra said. “Further back. Not near the door.”
I worked the lock with the tools Kasper had pressed into my hand before I left. The lock opened in under a minute.
I went in.
The corridor smelled worse at night. During the day the ventilation had been running, moving the chemical undertone through the building at a rate that made it manageable, almost ignorable. With the ventilation on its night cycle, the smell had concentrated into something that settled in the back of the throat.
It wasn’t the smell of wine.
Not any byproduct of wine production I had ever encountered.
Something biological. Something that should not have been in a fermentation corridor.
I moved toward the voices.
They were coming from the far end of the lower floor, past the fermentation unit, through a door I had not seen during the tour because it had been positioned behind one of the out-of-rotation vats, not hidden exactly, just placed in a blind spot that the tour had carefully skirted.
I stopped outside it.
Two voices were heard.
One was Corby, I recognized the compensating confidence of his tone even at low volume. The other was unfamiliar. Male, precisely.
I pressed close to the door and listened.
“....three of the current batch are ready for extraction,” the unfamiliar voice said. “Dickson needs the yield by end of week. The hospital has a backlog.”
“We’re behind schedule,” Corby said. “Two of them are in poor condition. If we push the extraction cycle....”
“Dickson doesn’t care about condition. He cares about yield.” A pause. “The Ashthorne name covers the shipping documentation. That’s all we need from this facility. Keep the documentation clean and keep the batches moving.”
“There’s been a complication,” Corby said. “The new Marchioness came today. She looked at the accounts.”
A silence.
“How much did she see?”
“The worker fatalities. The vat status. She asked to see the fermentation unit.” Corby’s voice had taken on a different quality, lower and less controlled. “She was looking at the vats when she left.”
“She’ll come back,” the other voice said.
“I know.”
“Make sure she doesn’t find anything worth finding.”
I had heard enough.
I pushed the door open.
The room beyond it was not a storage space.
It was large, larger than it should have been for a building of this footprint, which meant it extended beneath the foundation line, a construction I had not known existed. The lighting was industrial and cold.
There were eight people inside.
People — on reclined chairs, connected to lines.
Most of them were conscious. Some turned their heads when the door opened.
Corby spun around.
The man beside him, he should be in his fifties, took one look at me and moved for a second door at the far end of the room.
“Rowena,” Kyra called immediately.
I was already moving.
I crossed the room in seconds and caught the man before he reached the door. I brought him down and held him there as he struggled.
“Dickson Ashford,” I said, because I had placed the name from the conversation and from the regional business records I had reviewed with Celeste two weeks ago, the owner of Ridgeline Medical Group, the Ashthorne Group’s primary competitor in three subsidiary markets. “Stay down.”
He stayed down.
Corby had not run. He was standing by the chairs with a grave expression.
I stood up and looked at the room.
Eight people. Blood draw equipment, medical grade, the kind that required procurement through channels that would need documentation, which meant there was a paper trail somewhere that Dickson had believed was covered by the Ashthorne company name on the shipping records.
The yield Corby had mentioned was not wine.
It was blood, drawn, processed, used in whatever Ridgeline Medical was producing in its private hospital under the cover of legitimate research.
The three dead workers.
They had definitely seen this room. They had seen it and they had not survived the seeing.
“Alice would definitely have a hand in this. That woman loves illegal,” Kyra mocked.
Of course Alice had arranged this.
The company access, the documentation cover, the staff replacements that had cleared out anyone who might ask questions. She had handed the Ashthorne Wine Company to Dickson Ashford as an operational shell and taken whatever he had given her in return, money, probably, the kind that didn’t appear in standard account reviews.
The rage that moved through me was very clean.
“Keys,” I said to Corby. “To the lines. To the locks on those chairs.”
He produced them. His hands were shaking.
I went to the nearest person, a woman, probably in her mid-thirties, and began working the line free from her arm.
“You’re safe,” I said. “I’m going to get everyone out.”
She looked at me with eyes that were fully present and completely exhausted.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“The ones who’ve been here longest.....” she started and stopped. “Some of us, months.”
Months.
I worked methodically, going line by line, chair by chair, moving through the room with Kyra’s heightened senses monitoring the doors and the building above us for anyone else who might be coming.
By the time I reached the sixth person, two of the earlier ones were on their feet and helping with the others.
Corby sat on the floor against the wall and said nothing.
Dickson had not moved from where I had put him.
He knew better than to move.
When the last person was unhooked and upright I stood in the center of that terrible room and looked at the equipment and the chairs and the clinical orderliness of something that had been running as a system for long enough to develop its own routine. freewebnσvel.cѳm
Without thinking, I took out my phone and called Kasper.
He answered on the first ring. “Status.”
“I need you now,” I said. “Bring people. And call Celeste.” I looked at Dickson on the floor. “And tell Celeste to call the Alpha King’s office.”
He pause, probably in shock too. “That serious?”
“Kasper,” I said calmly. “Bring everyone.”
