Chapter 6: Behind the Paneling

Trev didn’t waste another second. He strode over to the vast oak bookcase that covered the eastern wall of the study. He began pulling heavy, leather-bound volumes off the shelves, tossing them carelessly onto the Persian rug.

"What are you looking for?" Hannah asked, her voice still shaky, but the pure panic had morphed into a tense, desperate focus. She hovered behind him, watching the digital timer on the screen from the corner of her eye. 23:15:02.

"There's a biometric scanner hidden behind one of these false spines," Trev muttered, his fingers flying over the books. "My father installed it when he bought the place. He was paranoid about corporate espionage."

"Given your recent confessions, I can see why," Hannah said dryly.

Trev threw her a sharp look but didn't argue. He pulled a thick copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, and a small, square panel clicked open behind it, revealing a glowing blue thumbprint scanner.

He pressed his thumb against the glass. The scanner beeped green. A heavy mechanical thud resonated from behind the wall, and the entire bookcase swung outward by a fraction of an inch. Trev grabbed the edge and heaved it open, revealing a narrow, unlit corridor.

"Get in," Trev instructed, grabbing a heavy brass floor lamp.

"What are you doing with the lamp?" Hannah asked, hesitating at the threshold of the dark passage.

"Jamming the door so it can't lock behind us," he said, wedging the heavy base into the doorframe. He pulled out his phone, turning on the flashlight app. "Stay close."

The hidden room was cold, smelling of ozone and dust. The beam of Trev’s phone illuminated rows of black server racks, blinking with hundreds of tiny green and amber lights. It looked like the brain of a machine.

"This controls the entire building's network," Trev explained, moving toward a central console equipped with a keyboard and a monitor. "Security cameras, smart locks, internal communications."

"Can you unlock the front door from here?"

"I can try," Trev said, his fingers flying across the dusty keyboard. The screen flared to life, asking for an admin password. He typed rapidly. "Access denied," he muttered, grinding his teeth. "She changed the root passwords."

"So we're still trapped."

"Not necessarily," Trev said, his eyes scanning the cascading lines of code on the screen. "If she changed the passwords, it means she accessed the system remotely. Which means there's a connection log. If I can trace the IP address she’s routing through, I might be able to figure out where the audio files are physically stored."

Hannah moved closer, the blue light of the monitor casting eerie shadows across her face. "You think she's keeping them on a physical drive? Why not just the cloud?"

"Because Eleanor is old-school," Trev said, a grim smile touching his lips. "She doesn't trust the cloud with something this sensitive. She’ll have it on an encrypted drive, probably kept in her personal safe."

Suddenly, the monitor flickered. The code vanished, replaced by a single, flashing sentence in bold white text against a black background.

DID YOU REALLY THINK I WOULDN'T KNOW ABOUT YOUR FATHER'S LITTLE HIDING PLACE, TREV?

Hannah gasped, gripping Trev's arm.

The text vanished, replaced by a live video feed. It wasn't a feed of the penthouse. It was a feed of a dimly lit street corner. A woman with blonde hair was walking to her car.

"Oh my god," Hannah whispered, the blood turning to ice in her veins. "That's... that's my sister. That's Sarah."

A new line of text appeared below the video feed.