She Married a Poor Mountain Man but he drove her to His Secret Hidden Mansion

Chapter 7

Elias moved fast, issuing orders with the calm precision of a man who had commanded soldiers under fire. Elijah was sent to the blast doors to monitor the breach. Esther was positioned in the kitchen corridor with the rifle, covering the secondary tunnel that connected to the lower mine shafts. Evelyn was placed at the top of the main staircase, behind a marble pillar, with the shotgun and a pouch of shells.

Elias stood in the center of the great hall, looking up at the mirrors that channeled moonlight through the fissures above. “When they breach the doors, they’ll come through the main tunnel. They’ll have torches. The light will blind them in the hall if we keep it dark.”

He picked up an iron poker from the fireplace and, with a single violent swing, shattered the main mirror array. The hall plunged into darkness. Only the faint hiss of gas lamps in the far tunnel remained.

They waited.

Evelyn crouched behind the pillar, her shoulder pressed against the cold marble, the shotgun heavy in her hands. Her heart was beating so fast she could feel it in her teeth. She thought about her father. She thought about the Sunday mornings when he’d stand at the pulpit and talk about David and Goliath, about Moses and Pharaoh, about ordinary people who stood against impossible odds because they had something worth standing for.

She had something worth standing for now.

The first explosion hit the blast doors with a sound like God slamming his fist on a table. The marble floor vibrated. Dust rained from the ceiling.

Elias’s voice, steady in the darkness: “Hold.”

A second blast, closer. The screech of metal being pried apart. Men’s voices echoing down the tunnel, muffled by stone but growing louder. Then a third blast, and the sound of the doors giving way — a groaning, tortured surrender of iron and rock.

“They’re through!” Elijah shouted from the corridor.

“Kill the lamps!” Elias commanded. Elijah turned the gas valve, and the last light died. The sanctuary plunged into absolute blackness.

Evelyn could hear them now. Boots on stone. The crackle of torches. Heavy breathing. And then a voice she recognized — a voice that had haunted her dreams for two years.

“Mercer.” No. “Vane.”

Judge Aldous Brannigan’s voice boomed down the tunnel, distorted by the acoustics into something monstrous. “I know you’re in here, boy. Come on out. We can settle this like civilized men.”

Silence.

“I’ve got eight men, Vane. All armed. We’ve got enough powder to bring this whole mountain down on your head. Sign over the mineral rights, and I’ll let you walk away. You and the girl.”

The torchlight entered the great hall.

Evelyn watched from above as the orange glow spread across the marble floor, pushing back the darkness inch by inch. She could see them now — eight men spread out, guns drawn. Brannigan walked in the center, his fine coat dusted with rock powder, his gold ring catching the firelight. Beside him, a lean man in a slouch hat moved with the careful, silent steps of a predator: Walt Pitman. And behind them, bringing up the rear with a pickaxe over his shoulder and a grin on his face, was Guthrie Voss.

Of course. Of course Voss was here. The man who had wanted to buy her was now here to take what she’d chosen instead.

The torchlight hit the gold-inlaid columns, and the marble floor gleamed, and every single man in that group stopped moving.

“Jesus Christ,” Pitman breathed. “It’s real.”

Brannigan’s face transformed. The mask of judicial authority, the careful composure of a man who controlled a territory, melted away. What was underneath was naked, trembling greed. He looked at the columns, the marble, the vast hall, and his eyes went wet. “It’s all real. Every rumor, every legend — the Vane mine.” He laughed, a high, cracking sound that echoed off the stone. “I own this. This is mine by territorial right. Vane squatted on government land. This all belongs to—”

The rifle shot came from the darkness above. The torch in the hand of the man beside Brannigan exploded in a shower of sparks. The man screamed and dropped the flame.

“You own nothing.”

Elias’s voice rang out from somewhere in the upper balcony. Evelyn couldn’t see him; she could only hear him. And his voice was the coldest thing she had ever heard — colder than the mountain, colder than the river in the canyon below.

“You’re standing in my home, Brannigan. You broke down my door. You brought armed men into my house where my wife sleeps.”

“Your wife.” Brannigan had ducked behind a column, his bravado cracking. “The Harker girl. You think I care about that worthless—”

Evelyn pulled the trigger. The shotgun blast echoed through the hall like the voice of God. She hadn’t aimed at Brannigan. She’d aimed at the floor two feet in front of him. Marble chips exploded upward, stinging his face, and he screamed and stumbled backward, blood running from a dozen tiny cuts on his cheeks.

“Finish that sentence,” Evelyn called down from the darkness, her voice shaking with fury and adrenaline. “Go ahead, Judge. Finish it.”

Brannigan clutched his bleeding face and stared up into the blackness where her voice had come from. And for the first time, Evelyn saw fear in his eyes. Real fear — the fear of a man who had always held power and suddenly realized he was standing in someone else’s house.

“Kill them!” Brannigan screamed. “Kill them both!”

The hall erupted. Gunfire lit the darkness in strobing flashes of white and orange. Evelyn pressed herself flat behind the pillar as bullets chipped the marble around her. She fumbled with the shotgun, broke it open, ejected the spent shell, loaded another with fingers that wouldn’t stop shaking.

Elias fired from the opposite balcony. Two shots, two men dropped. He moved positions after each shot, a ghost in the darkness, firing from a different spot each time so they couldn’t pin him down.

Elijah released the oil — gallons of crude flooding the marble floor at the base of the staircase. A man rushing the stairs went down hard, his legs flying out from under him. His torch hit the oil. A river of flame raced across the floor.

In the sudden flare of light, Evelyn saw Voss charging up the stairs, his pickaxe raised over his head, his face twisted into something barely human. He was coming straight for her. She raised the shotgun. He saw the barrel. He didn’t stop — too full of rage, too full of the humiliation of being rejected by a woman he considered his property.

“You were supposed to be mine!” Voss screamed.

Evelyn fired. The blast caught him in the shoulder. He spun, the pickaxe clattering away down the stairs, and he fell, sliding on the oil-slicked marble, howling in pain.

“I was never yours,” Evelyn said.

A stick of dynamite sailed through the air. Evelyn saw the fuse sparking. She didn’t have time to run.

Elias came out of nowhere, slamming into her, driving her behind the heavy oak door of the upper corridor. The explosion tore apart the staircase railing. Stone and marble flew like shrapnel. The concussion slammed them both against the wall.

Elias didn’t get up.

“Elias!” Evelyn rolled him over. Blood was streaming from a gash above his eye. His left leg was twisted at a bad angle, shrapnel glinting in it. He was conscious but dazed, his eyes unfocused.

“Stay with me. Stay with me.”

“How many left?” he gasped.

Evelyn peered around the doorframe. Through the smoke and firelight she could see Brannigan and Pitman and two other men still standing. Three men were on the floor and not moving. Voss was crawling down the stairs, leaving a trail of blood.

“Four still up,” she said. “Including Brannigan.”

Elias tried to stand. His leg buckled and he went down hard, biting back a scream. “The lever,” he gasped. “Behind the tapestry, east wall. The emergency purge — the floor opens.”

Evelyn looked at him. “What?”

“My father built traps into every room. The great hall floor has a section that drops into a ventilation shaft two hundred feet straight down, into the underground river. The lever is behind the tapestry on the east wall of the landing.”

“You want me to drop them into a hole?”

“I want you to survive.” He grabbed her arm, his grip iron despite the blood loss. “Evelyn, listen to me. Brannigan won’t stop. Even if we drive him out tonight, he’ll come back with twenty men, fifty men, the territorial militia. This ends now, or it never ends.”

Below them, Brannigan’s voice echoed through the smoke. “Pitman, get up those stairs. Finish this.”

Evelyn looked at the shotgun. One shell left. She looked at her husband, bleeding on the floor. She looked at the tapestry on the east wall, twenty feet away across an exposed landing.

“Esther!” she shouted into the corridor. “I need you!”

Esther appeared, covered in dust, the cast-iron skillet still in her hand. “I’m here, child.”

“Keep him alive,” Evelyn said, nodding at Elias. “I’m going to end this.”

“Evelyn, don’t.” Elias reached for her.

She was already gone.