Chapter 6 - THE FREEZING DARK
The cold inside the refrigeration container was immediate and biting.
I stumbled in the pitch black, my hands hitting the corrugated steel walls.
“Dad?” the word tore from my throat. It felt unnatural. Poisonous.
Adrian’s flashlight clicked on, slicing through the freezing air.
He didn’t look panicked. He looked like a man analyzing a chessboard.
“Elias Cole,” Adrian called out, his voice projecting clearly toward the ventilation grate. “You’re a ghost. I was told you died in a harbor fire fifteen years ago.”
A dry, echoing laugh filtered through the grate.
“I died so you could live, Adrian. I was your father’s cleaner. When Elena found out about the Rossi baby, she didn’t come to you. She came to me. She paid me to fake the records. To make Lily yours.”
Victoria huddled in her thin silk dress, shivering violently. “You took Lily. Give her back!”
“The girl is leverage,” Elias’s voice replied coldly. “Maria Rossi is getting out of prison next week. She wants her daughter. And she’s willing to give me control of the South Side ports for her. But you, Adrian... you have the ledger. The green box.”
Adrian looked at me, then at the velvet box in his hand.
He realized Elias was watching us through a thermal camera in the grate.
“I don’t have the ledger, Elias,” Adrian lied smoothly. “I left it at the house.”
“Don’t lie to a liar,” Elias sneered. “I know the maid has it. My daughter always was a snooping little rat. Tell her to slide the green box through the delivery hatch, or I turn the cooling unit down to negative twenty. You’ll freeze to death in an hour.”
My teeth were already chattering.
I looked at Adrian.
He stepped close to me, lowering his voice so the grate couldn’t pick it up.
“We don’t have the ledger. We only found letters.”
“Then what does he want?” I whispered.
Adrian looked at the velvet box. At my mother’s ring.
“He’s playing a game. He left this ring here for a reason. He wants you to know he’s in control.”
Adrian turned off the flashlight.
In the total darkness, he grabbed my hand. His grip was warm and grounding.
“Victoria,” Adrian whispered. “Move to the back corner. Away from the door.”
“What are you going to do?” she whimpered.
“I’m going to do what I do best.”
Adrian let go of my hand.
I heard the metallic click of him dropping the magazine from his handgun, checking his rounds by touch.
“Elias!” Adrian shouted toward the grate. “You want the ledger? You’ll have to take it off my body. But before you turn this freezer into a tomb, you should know one thing. Marcus has the perimeter surrounded. You start the engine on this container, the noise gives away your exact position. You’ll be dead before we drop five degrees.”
Silence from the outside.
Elias was thinking.
Then, the sudden, deafening roar of the refrigeration unit kicked on.
Icy air blasted from the ceiling vents.
He had called Adrian’s bluff.
“Get behind me,” Adrian ordered, shoving me into the corner with Victoria.
He didn’t shoot at the doors.
He aimed his gun at the heavy industrial cooling fan mounted near the ceiling.
He fired three times in rapid succession.
Sparks rained down.
The fan shrieked like a dying animal as the bullets shredded the motor.
Smoke poured into the container, thick and acrid, but the freezing air stopped.
Coughing, Adrian walked to the heavy steel doors.
He felt around the edges.
“He locked us in, but he destroyed his own leverage. He can’t freeze us now. He has to come in.”
We waited.
The smoke settled.
Five minutes passed. Then ten.
Suddenly, the heavy brass lock on the outside rattled.
The doors cracked open, spilling pale yellow floodlight into the container.
Adrian raised his gun.
But it wasn’t Elias standing there.
It was a little girl in a pale blue dress.
Lily.
She stood in the rain, holding a massive set of bolt cutters that she could barely lift.
She looked at Adrian, her eyes wide.
“I climbed out the window,” she whispered.
Adrian dropped his gun. He fell to his knees and pulled her into a desperate embrace.
I stepped out of the container, looking around the deserted shipping yard.
Elias was gone.
But nailed to the outside of the container door was a piece of paper.
I pulled it off.
It was a child’s drawing.
A drawing of Lily, holding hands with a woman who had dark hair and a kind smile.
At the bottom, written in blue crayon, were the words:
“Mommy promised we would go to the island.”
Adrian looked at the drawing over my shoulder.
His breath hitched.
“That’s not Elena,” he said.
I looked closer at the woman in the drawing.
She was wearing a silver locket.
May you like
The exact same locket I wore under my uniform every day.
“That’s my mother,” I whispered.
