Ten Minutes Beneath Vale House
Chapter 04 - Ten Minutes Beneath Vale House
Julian, Claire, and Vanessa raced through the lower corridors while Eleanor called the police from a secure line. Vanessa confessed that Marcus had approached her months earlier. He promised to help her control the family foundation if she copied Julian’s phone and wore the replica necklace out of the display room. She claimed she never knew he planned to frame Claire or destroy the hospital.
Claire wanted to hate her, but fear had stripped away Vanessa’s arrogance. “Help us stop him,” Claire said, “and tell the truth afterward.”
The archive lay behind a steel door beneath the east wing. Marcus had sealed it and activated an old incineration system once used to destroy financial records. Heat spread through the corridor as the countdown reached six minutes.
Julian’s restored account could not open the door. Claire remembered her blueprints: the lock included a pressure release connected to the estate’s original fountain system. If Vanessa shut down the pumps from the ballroom, Claire could force the mechanism manually.
Vanessa ran upstairs. Julian held a flashlight while Claire removed the wall panel and reached into the hot machinery. At three minutes, the pipes shuddered. Water pressure dropped. Claire pulled the release, and the steel door opened just wide enough for them to squeeze through.
Marcus stood beside the incinerator, feeding trust ledgers into the flames. The memory card rested on a metal table.
He told Julian that the family had wasted generations giving money away. “This house could make us untouchable.”
“It never made you family,” Julian answered.
Marcus lunged for the card. Claire reached it first. He grabbed her arm, but Julian pulled him away. During the struggle, Marcus stumbled against the emergency lever, releasing fireproof shutters that trapped him between archive cages until police arrived.
The countdown reached zero.
Nothing happened.
Vanessa had not merely shut off the fountain pumps. She had cut power to the purge system and uploaded the analog recording, bank transfers, and Marcus’s threats to a police evidence server. For once, the woman everyone underestimated had chosen the right side.
At dawn, officers led Marcus from Vale House. Vanessa surrendered the replica necklace and confessed publicly. She accepted that cooperation would not erase what she had done.
Claire handed the recovered memory card to Eleanor.
The matriarch examined it, then smiled faintly. “This is not the trust archive.”
A handwritten label on the card read: CLAIRE BENNETT — PRIVATE.
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The files were not about the estate.
They were letters Julian had written to Claire for two years but had never been allowed to send.
