Chapter 8 - The Room Beneath the House

Behind a wine rack in the mansion cellar stood a narrow steel door that Vincent had never seen open. Marco revealed a keypad hidden beneath the shelf. He entered a code from Salvatore's old notebooks, and the lock clicked.

Inside was a corridor painted blue. Fluorescent lights flickered awake overhead. Grace smelled antiseptic and old dust. Her heart started beating too fast.

“I've been here,” she whispered.

At the end stood a red door.

Vincent touched her elbow. “We can stop.”

“No. I'm done letting other people decide what I can stand.”

They opened three rooms before the red one. One held stacks of forged birth certificates. Another contained children's clothes in sealed plastic bags. The third had a wall of photographs, each labeled with a number. Grace found her own face beside WITNESS ONE. Below it was another photograph: Leo Mercer, alive, smiling, wearing the winged pin.

“Leo wasn't a child in their operation,” she said. “He was my partner.”

Marco pulled a file from the cabinet. “He was also an investigator. He went undercover with the circus after your father disappeared.”

Grace felt her stomach fall. “He told me he loved me.”

“That part might have been real,” Vincent said quietly.

She hated that she wanted him to say more.

The red door had no handle, only a biometric lock. Marco found a backup mechanical release. Inside sat a chair, an audio recorder, and a television monitor. On the far wall, someone had written in thick marker: THE BIRD ALWAYS COMES BACK.

Grace remembered a woman singing to her in a blue room. She remembered being told to repeat a strange sequence of numbers until she could say it in her sleep. Then she remembered screaming when a red door closed.

A screen flickered on by itself. Vanessa appeared on a recorded video, dressed in white silk and smiling as if she'd been invited to dinner.

“Hello, Grace. I wondered when you'd find the family basement.”

Grace stepped toward the screen.

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Vanessa lifted the diamond ring from the velvet box. “Your mother made one mistake. She trusted a Moretti. Don't make the same mistake twice.”

Behind Vanessa, bound to a chair, sat Nora.