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

Chapter 8

Evelyn sprinted across the landing, staying low, her shoes sliding on the debris-covered marble. A bullet whizzed past her head, so close she felt the heat of it against her ear. She reached the east wall, grabbed the tapestry, and yanked it aside.

The lever was there. A heavy iron mechanism set into the stone, exactly where Elias said it would be.

“Brannigan!” Evelyn shouted. She stepped to the edge of the landing, making herself visible. It was the most terrifying thing she had ever done — to stand in the firelight, the shotgun hanging at her side, and look down at the judge.

Brannigan looked up at her. His face was cut and bleeding, his fine coat ruined, his composure shattered, but his gun was steady. “It’s over, girl. You’ve got nothing left.”

“You’re right.” Evelyn’s voice carried across the hall. “I’ve got nothing. I had nothing the day you destroyed my father. I had nothing the day you tried to sell me to Voss. I’ve been nothing my whole life, in your eyes.”

She put her hand on the lever.

“But my father taught me something you never learned, Judge. He taught me that the meek don’t just inherit the earth.” Her voice hardened into steel. “Sometimes they open it up and swallow the wicked whole.”

She pulled the lever.

The marble floor beneath Brannigan’s feet split open with a sound like the mountain cracking in half. He looked down. For one frozen second, his eyes met Evelyn’s, and she saw the understanding hit him — the terrible, final realization that he had been beaten by the daughter of the man he’d destroyed.

Then he fell. His scream echoed up the shaft for a long, long time before the river swallowed it.

Pitman and the two remaining men stared at the hole in the floor. They stared at Evelyn standing on the landing with her hand on the lever and the fire burning behind her. They stared at the bodies of their companions, and the blood on the stairs, and the smoke in the air.

Pitman dropped his gun. It clattered on the marble and slid toward the edge of the open shaft. “I’m done,” he said, and raised his hands. “I’m done. Ain’t no amount of money worth this.”

The other two followed — guns down, hands up.

From somewhere in the corridor, Esther’s voice rang out. “Elias Vane, you stay down, or so help me God, I will sit on you.”

Evelyn sank to her knees on the landing. The shotgun fell from her hand. Her whole body was shaking — the adrenaline that had carried her through the last twenty minutes drained out of her like water through a cracked cup, leaving nothing but exhaustion and a grief so vast she couldn’t see the edges of it.

She had killed a man. She had dropped a man into a hole in the earth and listened to him scream all the way down. And the man she’d killed was the same man who had sat in a courtroom and sentenced her father to die.

She didn’t know if she should pray or throw up.

Elias dragged himself across the floor to her. His leg was useless, his face a mask of blood, but he pulled himself along the marble with his arms until he reached her. He put his hand on the back of her neck and pulled her forehead against his.

“It’s over,” he whispered. “Evelyn, it’s over.”

“My father,” she said, and her voice broke into pieces. “He’s gone, and he’ll never know. He’ll never know.”

“He knows. Believe me. He knows.”

They sat on the ruined landing of the great hall, holding each other in the smoke and the firelight, while below them the mountain kept its secrets and the river carried away the last of Judge Aldous Brannigan’s ambitions.

Outside, the storm raged on. But inside the mountain, for the first time in ten years, the silence felt like peace.