Chapter 140
The stairwell leading to the second floor was carpeted, which felt absurd after the concrete and linoleum below.
Someone had put in effort here. The walls were painted a pale, institutional green, and the railings had been polished recently enough that Charlotte’s hand left a faint smudge on the metal.
She climbed slowly. Each step carried the weight of what awaited her above, and the knife in her hand felt both essential and inadequate.
Derek had mentioned there were two guards, possibly more.
She would handle them the way she had dealt with the others, or she wouldn’t. Either outcome led to the same door.
The second-floor corridor extended east to west, with former classrooms converted into offices and quarters, each marked by a Cyrillic nameplate on the door.
Most were dark, but a few had light shining beneath the thresholds, casting the soft yellow glow of desk lamps rather than the harsh fluorescents found in the detention areas.
It was where the administration resided, the people who made decisions about the cells below.
Charlotte moved east. The altered uniform jacket, torn at the shoulder from the fence, hung loose around her frame.
She kept one hand on the knife and the other ready for whatever door might open.
She found the first guard ten yards from the east corner.
He was seated on the floor with his back against the wall, his head tilted at an angle that required no closer examination.
Blood had pooled on the carpet beneath him, dark and already drying.
His sidearm was missing from its holster.
The second guard lay three feet away, facedown, with a wound at the base of his skull.
Someone had taken them from behind with the kind of precision that suggested either training or desperate focus.
Charlotte stepped over the bodies and noticed that the blood was tacky beneath her boot.
The east corner door stood ahead, heavier than the others, with a key card reader beside the handle and no light visible beneath the threshold.
She swiped the card, and the reader blinked green.
The lock disengaged with a soft electronic chime, and the door swung inward on well-oiled hinges into a room that stopped her cold.
It had once been a classroom. Wide windows along the east wall were covered with heavy curtains, but enough predawn light seeped through the edges to illuminate the space in muted grays.
Someone had furnished it with things taken from houses or offices or wherever occupying forces found the comforts they believed they deserved.
A dark wood desk occupied the center of the room.
Bookshelves lined one wall, filled with volumes in Russian and English that no one here had time to read.
A leather sofa sat against the far wall beneath a map of Colorado marked with red pins.
There was even a brick-lined fireplace, with an iron grate and tools arranged beside it on a stand.
The room held two people, and one of them was dead on the floor. Sophia stood over him, six feet from where Charlotte had frozen in the doorway. For one second, she couldn’t reconcile the girl in front of her with the child she had carried in memory through every mile of this journey.
She was wearing a blue dress, the kind someone might wear to a formal school party or a dinner party, with a fitted bodice and a skirt that fell to mid-calf.
It was clean and looked new. Someone had put it on her because they thought appearance mattered in a room where a man lay dead on the carpet.
In her hands, gripped with both fists, was a fireplace poker.
The iron rod was dark with blood along its length, and Sophia held it like the only thing between herself and whatever came next.
Her knuckles were white. Her arms trembled from the aftermath of effort or fear, or both.
She hadn’t seen Charlotte yet. Her eyes were fixed on the body, on the man she had killed, and the expression on her face was the particular blankness of someone whose mind had gone somewhere else.
Charlotte’s voice faltered, unable to form the words she so desperately wanted to say.
Instead, her daughter’s name slipped out, raw and cracked, capturing Sophia’s attention.
Their eyes locked across the room, and for a haunting moment, everything stood still.
The body on the floor, the blood staining the carpet, the dress, the poker—the gulf that had once stretched across eight states was now a mere twelve feet of devastated space and a lifeless man.
She watched as recognition slowly flickered in Sophia’s eyes, like a delicate hope reemerging after being lost. In that moment, hope felt almost as painful as fear.
Then, without thinking, Charlotte moved.
She crossed the room in just three strides; the knife falling from her hand as her heart drew her closer to her daughter.
With Sophia’s name echoing in her mind, she knew she needed to reach out.
The poker clattered to the floor in front of them, but Sophia, too, was compelled to set aside everything, her hands ready to embrace the urgency of the moment.