Chapter 7

The ladder went down thirty feet. The rungs were slick with mold. I went first. Vance followed. Grady stayed above with a radio. The shaft narrowed until my shoulders scraped both walls. Then it opened into a low tunnel. Water dripped from the ceiling. The floor was ankle-deep and black.

“Boss, this is a death trap,” Vance whispered.

“Then stay behind me.”

We moved forward. The tunnel curved. I heard a click. Then a steel cable snapped up from the floor. Vance shouted. The cable caught his leg and yanked him upside down. His gun clattered into the water. He hung there, swinging, blood rushing to his face.

“Cut me down!” he yelled.

I knelt, pulled a knife, and sawed through the cable. Vance hit the water hard. He came up sputtering, his ankle already swelling.

“Go,” he said. “I’ll catch up.”

I gave him the flashlight and took the spare. Then I heard Ellis’s voice from a speaker hidden in the wall.

“You should have stayed in your office, Marcus. You were always better at signing papers than saving people.”

I didn’t answer. I followed the pipe. The tunnel opened into a room. It was larger than the cell in B-2. A cot. A chair. A small table with a candle. And on the cot, wrapped in a thin blanket, was Danielle.

She was forty-four now. Her hair had gone gray at the temples. Her face was thin, her wrists scored with old rope burns. But when she saw me, she smiled. It was the same smile from our childhood. The one she gave me when we were hungry and scared and she still believed I could fix it.

“Marcus,” she whispered.

I crossed the room and knelt beside her. I took her hand. It was ice.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

She shook her head. “You didn’t know.”

“I should have.”

“Ellis made sure you didn’t.” She touched my face. “He told me you were dead. For years. He said you chose the empire over me. He said you let me burn.”

“I would have burned with you.”

“I know.” Her eyes moved past me. “Where’s Toby?”

“Here,” a small voice said.

Toby stepped out from behind a boiler. He looked thinner than he had at the fight. His bare feet were blue with cold. But he was alive.

I opened my arms. He ran into them. I held him and Danielle together. For one moment, the sub-basement was the safest place in Detroit.

Then the lights went out. Ellis’s voice came from everywhere. “How touching. Now give me the ledgers, or I flood this room.”