Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Declan
“Declan?” Bella's voice was small and hesitant against my chest, her breath warm through my damp shirt. “Say something. Please.”
White-hot anger blazed through me, and I bit down so hard I felt every one of my teeth.
Bella pressed her palm flat against my chest and eased back. Her hand lingered over my heart, like she could feel it hammering against my ribs. “I'm sorry,” she whispered, her breath hitching. “Mom wasn't lying, Declan. Your father really—”
“I believe you.” The words came out like gravel.
Her chin quivered as those stunning eyes searched mine, all desperate and hopeful. “You do?”
“You know Dad disappeared a few weeks ago, right?”
She nodded slowly, uncertainty flickering across her face. “Nobody told me directly. I just figured something was wrong by the way everyone acted.”
“Well, since he vanished, I've been finding things.” I swallowed hard.
“In the accounts. It was like he'd been going in and covering things up for years.
Moving money around, hiding transactions, creating false invoices.
With him gone, he can't do that anymore, and the rot's being exposed.” My voice turned caustic.
“I'd been questioning his decisions for years, fighting him on everything.
But now, I'm questioning every goddamn word that ever came out of his mouth like it was all a bunch of bullshit.”
“I'm sorry,” she breathed, and the genuine sympathy in her voice nearly undid me.
“Don't be.” I shook my head. “Dad has a lot of enemies, Bella—and for damn good reasons.”
The silence that followed was heavily loaded with everything we'd just laid bare.
Her stomach growled, breaking the silence, and her cheeks flushed pink. “Sorry. Still hungry. I could eat another three of those cardboard bars.” A weak smile tugged at her lips.
I huffed. “Same. Come on, let's see if we can find more.”
Placing my hands on her waist, I helped her down from the table.
Side by side, we walked toward a row of desks.
“You check those desks,” I said as I aimed for the first-aid cabinet mounted on the rough stone wall.
I pulled open the metal door again and scoured its contents: bandages, antiseptic, and thermal blankets.
I pushed aside a coil of medical tape and spotted two more silver packets wedged in the back corner. “I found some more of those bars.”
“And I found bottled water,” she said. “Under here.” She pointed under the desk.
I handed the bars to Bella and reached under the desk to pull out a slab of bottled water. The plastic wrap around them had gone rock hard, and it was an effort to tear open the packet. I pulled out a bottle and undid the lid for her.
“Thanks.” A tiny smile crossed her lips, but it didn’t reach her eyes. Her revelation was still tearing her up.
She tore open the food wrapper with her teeth and took a bite. “Better than nothing,” she said around a mouthful.
I ripped mine open and bit down. It still tasted like cardboard, but my stomach didn't care. We ate in silence, the sound of chewing oddly loud in the cavernous space.
When we finished, I crumpled the empty packet in my fist. We had two more bottles of water but hadn’t found any other food. And we had no way out of here.
We were still in a ton of trouble.
“I have no idea how anyone worked down here.” Her gaze lifted toward the elevator shaft above us.
I followed her stare upward. From where we stood on the main floor, the mine shaft stretched up like a massive throat carved into the earth with circular walls of striated rock in shades of brown and gray spiraling up and up until they disappeared into shadow.
Emergency lights cast weak yellow pools across the walls, barely reaching the abandoned equipment scattered around us.
“It's not for everyone, that's for sure. See if we can find some more food,” I said, moving toward a row of sorting tables pushed against the far wall. Dust covered every tool, piece of paper, and rusty container.
Bella joined me, and together, we sifted through the mess. “Did you spend much time down here?” she asked, picking up a cracked clipboard and setting it aside.
“Yeah, I did.” I shoved aside a wooden crate with a bunch of rocks inside. “Before I'd even approached Dad with my plan to reopen the mine, I'd done extensive research on the mine's history. Koolaroo needed money, and I was looking for ways to diversify our income.”
“Like tea trees and olive trees?” She tilted her head, smirking, and the light caught in her eyes, making her irises look like rare blue crystals.
“Yeah,” I said. “I still can't believe he tried to grow those trees, especially with the Hendersons. He hates them.”
“It was a long time ago.” Bella moved to another table, her bandaged fingers picking through the dusty crap. “Maybe that partnership for the tea trees was the reason why he hates them.”
“Maybe.” I frowned, trying to work out how long Dad had been bitching about the family who owned the neighboring property. The hatred felt older than that, though. Deeper. Like it had roots tangled in grudges going back generations.
“So...” Bella glanced at me over her shoulder. “Your dad agreed to reopen the mine?”
A bitter laugh escaped me. “Hell no. He was dead set against it from the start. We had screaming matches that lasted hours, sometimes for days.”
I picked up a chunk of rock from the table, turning it over in my hands, trying to work out why it was even on the table. “I fought him every step of the way. Stood my ground.” Stood up to him for the first time in my goddamn life.
Reopening the mine had turned out to be the worst decision of my life. Not just my life. The men I’d hired had relied on me to have my shit together. But I'd been wrong about this rotten place. So damn wrong.
I pegged the rock at the crumpled lift across the chasm. It shattered against the twisted metal and fragments scattered across the stone floor with sharp, echoing cracks.
Bella stared at me with wide eyes and her jaw open.
Shit. The last thing I wanted to do was scare her.
“I crunched the numbers for this mine until my eyes bled. I researched yields from the old reports, compared them to current market prices, and calculated equipment costs to the last dollar. I brought in a geologist to assess the remaining deposits.” My jaw tightened.
“I believed it would work. I knew it would work.”
The income I'd planned to make from diamonds pulled from this mine would have pulled Koolaroo out from under the mountain of debt Frank had buried us under with all his damn shady deals.
But my diamond mine had failed.
Fast.
Dragging my thoughts from that bullshit, I pointed to the crumpled lift on the far side of the chasm. “Let's check out that section.”
Beyond the twisted wreckage was the entrance to the most recent excavation—the tunnel the geologist had identified as having the most potential.
But, we'd barely broken new ground on it when everything had gone to shit.
Equipment malfunctions that made no sense.
Drill bits shattering for no reason, equipment failing despite being brand new.
Structural issues that shouldn't have existed in rock this stable.
Injuries that had kept happening, no matter how careful we were, no matter how many safety protocols I had implemented.
And through it all, we hadn't found any diamonds worth the effort, or at least worth the small fortune I'd sunk into this project.
As we neared the lift, I studied the severed cable coiled on the ground like a dead snake. That cable had been sabotaged. No doubt about it.
Frank sabotaged that olive oil.
Bella's statement ricocheted around my brain like a bullet in a steel drum.
Did my own father do this, too?
Ice shot through my veins.
What if the lift wasn't the only thing he’d sabotaged?
What if he'd deliberately destroyed the mine to make sure we'd find nothing? Had he destroyed my dream so he could prove himself right? Just so he could say, “I fucking told you so?” So I'd never question his decisions again?
What if everything he'd ever told me had been bullshit?
“You okay?”
Bella's voice snapped me out of the spiral. I spun toward her, heart pounding.
She backed up a step, watching me all wary and uncertain.
Maybe I'd groaned out loud. “No,” I said, hearing the edge in my voice.
Her hand drifted to her side, hovering near her stab wound on her hip like she was bracing for an attack.
“I am not okay,” I said. “Without that lift, there's absolutely no other way to get out of here.”
She flinched back another step, her entire body going rigid. Her eyes flashed with fear.
Like I was a bomb about to go off. Like I was a monster.
Shit.
“Sorry.” I forced my fingers to uncurl, held my hands up, palms out. “Didn't mean to yell. It's just...” I shook my head, then dragged my gaze back to that severed cable. “That cut cable makes no sense. Somebody did that on purpose. But why?”
“Maybe they didn't want anyone coming down here?” Her voice was tentative, like she was wary of my response. “For safety?”
“But I'd secured the lift at the top. I locked it in position with a padlock the size of my fist and disabled the power at the breaker box. It wasn't going anywhere.” Until someone cut that cable and sent it plummeting hundreds of meters to the bottom of the shaft.
We moved toward the tunnel entrance, our footsteps echoing against the stone. Mine steady and even. Hers uneven with only one sneaker. Bella studied the rock wall as we walked, slow and thoughtful, her gaze tracking the striations in the layered sediment. Maybe looking for diamonds.
I could relate to that. When I'd first gotten excited about this mine, everywhere I’d looked, I’d seen a potential diamond seam. I'd imagined finding those precious stones in every shadow, every glint of quartz, every promising vein of kimberlite.
Maybe I was a stupid bloody dreamer like Dad had constantly told me.