Chapter 5 - THE CHILDREN UNDER THE MANSION
Smoke rolled from the hidden stairwell.
Detective Hale ordered everyone outside.
I refused to move.
“There are children down there.”
“Fire crews are entering.”
“My son knows the layout.”
“No child is going back into that basement.”
Noah stood against me, shaking.
“The fire isn’t in our rooms.”
“How do you know?” Hale asked.
“The alarm has different sounds.”
He pointed toward the stairway.
“That one means they are burning records.”
Charles heard him from where officers restrained him.
“Do not listen to the boy. He is medicated.”
Noah’s grip tightened.
“I am not confused.”
Vivian sat in the wheelchair, breathing through an oxygen mask.
She raised one trembling hand.
“There is a service tunnel behind the kitchen pantry. It leads to the sleeping wing.”
Hale sent a tactical team toward the pantry.
Firefighters entered the main stairwell.
I stayed near Noah while paramedics examined Vivian.
Nathan stood in handcuffs beside Charles.
He looked toward the smoke with genuine fear.
“How many children did you know about?” I asked.
“Three.”
“Noah said eleven.”
“My father told me the other rooms were unused.”
Charles laughed.
“You believed what was convenient.”
Nathan turned on him.
“You said Northstar was protecting sick children.”
“It was.”
“You called them property.”
“I used an imprecise word under pressure.”
“Which children did you know about?”
Nathan looked at the floor.
“Noah. A girl named Rose. A boy named Elliot.”
My uncle’s name.
“Why Elliot?”
“I don’t know.”
Vivian removed her oxygen mask.
“I do.”
The paramedic tried to stop her.
She continued.
“Elliot Vale was Claire’s older brother.”
I stared at her.
“I never had a brother.”
“You did.”
Again, another child.
Another erased life.
Vivian’s eyes filled with shame.
“He was born when I was seventeen. My parents forced me to surrender him through a private adoption organization connected to the Reeds.”
“Northstar?”
“It had another name then.”
“What happened to him?”
“He found me thirty years later. He wanted to know why I gave him away. I told him the truth.”
“Is he the boy downstairs?”
“No. Your brother died four years ago.”
The weight of grief for a stranger landed strangely.
I had lost someone before learning he existed.
“Then who is the child named Elliot?”
“His son.”
My nephew.
Northstar had taken children across generations.
“Why?”
“Your brother investigated the trust. He discovered the embryo program and threatened to expose Charles.”
“How did he die?”
Vivian looked toward Charles.
“His car went off a bridge.”
Charles said nothing.
His silence confessed more clearly than words.
Nathan stared at his father.
“You killed him?”
“I protected this family.”
“You murdered Claire’s brother.”
“He was not part of our family.”
“That is your answer to everything,” I said. “Anyone you cannot control becomes disposable.”
A firefighter emerged from the stairwell.
“The archive room is burning, but suppression systems are working. We found locked medical doors.”
“Children?” Hale asked.
“Not yet.”
Noah pulled at my sleeve.
“The sleeping wing is behind the blue wall.”
“What blue wall?”
“In the hallway. It looks like a picture of the ocean.”
I repeated this to the firefighter.
He radioed the team.
Minutes later, voices erupted from the stairwell.
“First child located.”
Then another.
And another.
Firefighters carried children into the ballroom.
A girl approximately nine years old.
Two boys younger than Lily.
A toddler wearing hospital pajamas.
Each child had a number on the bracelet instead of a surname.
Paramedics moved them outside.
Noah counted silently.
“One. Two. Three.”
He continued until ten children had emerged.
“Rose is missing.”
“Who is Rose?” I asked.
“My sister.”
I looked at Nathan.
He closed his eyes.
“You said you knew a girl named Rose.”
“She was born through the same program as Noah.”
“Is she biologically related to me?”
Nathan hesitated.
“Yes.”
My daughter.
Another child created without my knowledge.
“How old?”
“Eight.”
Older than Lily.
Northstar had used my stolen eggs for years.
“What happened to her?”
“She was moved last month.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
Noah pulled his drawing from his sweater.
On the back was a map.
He pointed to a small black square beneath the treatment room.
“Rose hides here when Grandfather gets angry.”
The tactical team returned underground.
Charles began struggling against the officers.
“You cannot open that chamber.”
“Why?” Hale demanded.
“The equipment is unstable.”
“What equipment?”
“A cryogenic system.”
The missing archive.
Embryos.
Genetic samples.
Perhaps children.
Hale ordered the evacuation perimeter expanded.
A bomb technician entered with the firefighters.
Nathan looked at me.
“Claire, if the chamber loses power, thousands of samples will be destroyed.”
“Samples taken without consent?”
“Some belong to families who paid legally.”
“Then the courts can sort them out.”
“You don’t understand what is inside.”
“That phrase has protected your secrets long enough.”
Noah leaned closer.
“Rose said there are people sleeping in the glass beds.”
I stared at him.
“What people?”
“Babies who don’t grow.”
Embryos, perhaps.
But he had said people, not dots in laboratory tubes.
A radio transmission came from the underground team.
“We located the cryogenic chamber.”
A pause followed.
Then the firefighter’s voice changed.
“This is not embryo storage.”
Hale grabbed the radio.
“What do you see?”
“Twelve transparent medical pods.”
“Occupied?”
“Eleven appear empty.”
“And the twelfth?”
Another pause.
“A female child. Approximately eight years old.”
Noah began crying.
“Rose.”
The pod had no external release.
Its controls required Northstar authorization.
Charles refused to provide it.
“If you open it incorrectly, she dies.”
“Then give us the code,” Hale said.
“No.”
Nathan stepped toward his father despite the handcuffs.
“That is your granddaughter.”
“She is an unauthorized result.”
Nathan struck him.
Officers pulled them apart.
Charles fell against the floor, laughing.
“You still think blood makes her family?”
Nathan stared at him.
“You taught me it was the only thing that mattered.”
“I taught you that useful blood matters.”
The cruelty finally stripped away Nathan’s last excuse.
He looked at me.
“I know the first half of the code.”
“Why only half?”
“My mother has the rest.”
Eleanor was gone.
In the chaos, she had disappeared through the ballroom.
Security footage showed her entering the garage six minutes earlier.
She drove away in Brooke’s car.
Brooke sat near the fireplace while a paramedic treated her face.
When Hale questioned her, she gave him the vehicle’s tracking information.
“She’ll go to St. Catherine’s Cemetery,” Brooke said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because Northstar has an emergency vault beneath the Reed mausoleum.”
Charles shouted for her to be quiet.
Brooke looked at him.
“You hit me because I hesitated to hurt a child.”
“You knew what you were joining.”
“No. You told me we were curing them.”
“You were paid.”
“I was lied to.”
I heard my own pain reflected in her words.
That did not erase the affair.
It did not make her innocent.
But it made her useful.
“What is in the cemetery vault?” Hale asked.
“Identity files. Cash. Passports.”
“And the second half of Rose’s code?”
“Eleanor keeps it inside a silver locket.”
Police units headed toward the cemetery.
The underground team reported that Rose’s oxygen level was falling.
The pod’s internal timer showed twenty-eight minutes.
Nathan provided the code he knew.
Four digits.
Lily’s birth time.
He had remembered that detail.
Some part of him had always known the children were connected.
Brooke looked toward the dark window.
“Eleanor will not surrender.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because the locket also contains the key to Northstar’s offshore accounts.”
The frozen transfer had trapped the Reeds financially.
The archive release had exposed their crimes.
The locket was Eleanor’s escape route.
She would sacrifice Rose to preserve it.
Noah touched my hand.
“Grandmother Vivian taught Rose a song.”
“What song?”
He hummed four notes.
My mother’s lullaby.
The one she sang to me every night as a child.
Four notes.
Four numbers.
The melody might be the code.
I asked Nathan for the first half.
3-1-4-2.
The lullaby’s opening notes corresponded to 2-4-1-3.
Eight digits together.
Hale radioed the underground team.
They entered the sequence.
The pod unlocked.
Rose was carried upstairs unconscious but breathing.
She had long dark hair and a heart-shaped face.
She looked like Lily in eight years.
She looked like me as a child.
I followed the paramedics outside.
Snow fell across the driveway while Christmas music continued playing inside the mansion.
Noah stood on one side of me.
Nathan remained behind police lines.
As Rose’s eyes opened, she stared at my face.
“Are you the real Claire?”
I took her hand.
“Yes.”
She began crying.
“Vivian said you would come when the tree went dark.”
“I’m here.”
Her fingers tightened.
“There is another place.”
“What place?”
“The house where they keep the mothers.”
Before she could say more, she lost consciousness.
Vivian heard her from the nearby ambulance.
My mother’s face filled with terror.
“Blackwater Lodge.”
“What is that?”
She looked toward Charles as officers placed him in a police vehicle.
“The place where women disappear after Northstar takes their babies.”
Then she told me something even worse.
May you like
One of those women was Nathan’s biological mother.
And she had been imprisoned there for forty-two years.
