Chapter 1 - The Match in the Dark
The sulfur flared.
Even through the ancient oak paneling and the horsehair plaster, the smell hit Clara Hayes like a slap. Beneath the pungent bite of the match was the suffocating, chemical stench of kerosene—poured lavishly across the nursery’s Persian rugs.
"Burn it," the hitman’s voice rasped again from the nursery. "Leave no Costello breathing."
Footsteps pounded away down the corridor. A heavy whoosh echoed outside the hidden door as the accelerant caught. Heat blossomed instantly, radiant and terrifying, pressing against the antique wood like a living beast.
Inside the cramped wall cavity, Clara’s lungs seized. Dust and centuries of dead lime tickled her throat. She clamped her teeth together, biting the inside of her cheek until the copper taste of blood flooded her mouth. Oliver shifted against her collarbone, whimpering. Owen squirmed under her left arm, his tiny fingers clawing through her thin cotton uniform.
"Shh, my sweet boys," she breathed, her lips pressed against Oliver’s hair. "Quiet. Just breathe into me."
The old service passage was a pitch-black vertical coffin. In the 1890s, before electricity and modern elevators, the Costello estate had run on coal and sweat. A rusty iron ladder clung to the brickwork, leading down toward the foundation vents and the boiler flue. But Clara was holding two six-month-old infants. She couldn’t climb an iron ladder with both hands full.
Smoke began to curl through the joints of the paneling—black, oily, and boiling hot.
She looked down. Two feet below the landing lay the rotting wooden floor of an old dumbwaiter shaft, severed ropes dangling like nooses. Beside it was an exterior ventilation shaft designed for airflow, sloping downward toward the cliffside gardens.
Clara stripped off her heavy apron. With frantic, steady hands born of years caring for sick siblings and her bedridden mother, she bound Oliver securely to her chest with the thick canvas ties, knotting the straps three times behind her shoulder blades. Then, she wrapped Owen in her wool cardigan, cradling him tightly in the crook of her left arm.
Her right hand was free.
She kicked the rusted vent grate. Once. Twice. The aged iron yielded with a violent screech, giving way to the cold, biting sea air of the Rhode Island coastline.
Below her, thirty feet down a craggy, weed-choked embankment, lay the jagged rocks and the Atlantic surge. The mansion above her was already groaning, floorboards warping under the sudden inferno. Black smoke bellowed from the upper windows.
"Hold on, little ones," Clara whispered, her voice trembling but unbroken.
She slid into the narrow vent chute feet first, using her boots and her right palm to brake against the rough tin. The metal tore through her trousers, shredding the skin of her forearm as she controlled her descent. The heat of the fire roared behind her like a dragon blowing down the flue.
With a bone-jarring thud, she hit the muddy drainage basin at the bottom of the foundation wall. Rain lashed her face. Behind her, the nursery windows blew outward in a shower of glittering, fiery glass.
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She rose through the mud, clutching the boys to her chest. She didn't look back at the burning palace. She plunged straight into the dark, freezing woods.
***
