Chapter 33 - THE ARCHITECT EMERGES
Nicholas reached up, hooked his fingers into the rim of the laundry chute, and hauled himself up three feet until he could reach Lucy’s waist. He pulled the child free from the sheet metal, lowering her gently to the concrete floor.
"Isabella," Nicholas said without looking back. "Take her. If you let anyone touch her before I come out of that culvert, I will spend the rest of my life hunting you down to whatever hole you crawled out of."
Isabella knelt. For the first time, her cold, aristocratic composure seemed to waver. She took the little girl’s trembling hand, her fingers closing gently around the uninjured wrist. "I stayed dead twenty-three years to see this finished, Nicholas. I’m not leaving the girl."
Nicholas didn't answer. He turned toward the open iron gate, clicked his rifle’s safety off, and stepped into the black mouth of the storm drain.
The culvert was eight feet wide, arched with nineteenth-century red brick, the floor covered in two inches of sluggish, freezing run-off water. The air was thick with the smell of river mud, sulfur, and something sharp and chemical—gun oil and high-grade tobacco.
Nicholas walked through the water, his boots cutting through the current with slow, deliberate rhythm. He didn't use a light. He followed the faint, rhythmic scraping of leather soles fifty yards ahead in the dark.
"You took twenty-three years to grow up, Nicky," a voice echoed through the curved brickwork.
The voice was older, deeper than Nicholas remembered, but the cadence was unmistakably the same voice that had taught him how to clean a revolver at eight years old on the back porch of the Lake George house.
Nicholas stopped. He raised the rifle to his shoulder.
Thirty yards ahead, where the brick tunnel widened into an old municipal junction chamber, a solitary battery-operated lantern sat on a dry concrete ledge. Standing beside the lantern was a man in an impeccably tailored charcoal overcoat, his silver hair cropped close, his jaw square and clean-shaven. He looked seventy, but he held himself with the straight, predatory posture of an officer on parade.
In his left hand, the man held a silver straight razor, its blade folded neatly back into its mother-of-pearl handle.
In his right hand, he held a short-barreled Colt revolver, the barrel resting against the temple of Maria Santos, who was kneeling on the wet brick with her hands zip-tied behind her back.
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"Hello, Father," Nicholas said.
***
