Chapter 24 - Belladonna Was Attacked From Beneath the KitchenRosa heard the first sound beneath the pantry floor.
Not footsteps.
Drilling.
She moved Nico and the remaining workers toward the front dining room while Tomas secured the copied records in Belladonna’s fireproof safe.
The floor exploded before they reached the stairs.
Three masked intruders emerged from an old smuggling tunnel. They carried stun weapons and gas canisters, not guns.
They wanted prisoners.
Rosa threw a pot of boiling water at the first attacker. Nico struck the second with a serving tray. Belladonna’s workers, once trained to lower their eyes, fought with knives, pans, chairs, and broken table legs.
The restaurant had survived men who believed fear was ownership.
It would not surrender quietly again.
The third intruder reached the private dining room and removed his mask.
David.
His face was thinner. A scar crossed his jaw where Gabriel had struck him during the original uprising.
“You should have stayed obedient,” he told Rosa.
“You should have stayed in prison.”
David claimed Corvin had prepared hidden loyalists before his fall. Bernadette offered them new identities in exchange for the Carter archive.
He grabbed Tomas and forced him toward the safe.
Tomas entered the code.
The door opened.
Inside was no archive.
Only the torn work log beneath another sheet of glass.
On its back, Lily had written the names of every worker David had cheated.
While David stared at it, Nico triggered the kitchen fire-suppression system.
Foam filled the room.
Rosa struck David behind the knee. Tomas slammed the safe door against his hand.
Then Samuel’s convoy arrived.
David fled into the tunnel.
Samuel followed despite his cane.
Beneath Belladonna, he found David standing beside a timed charge attached to the building’s gas line.
“You cannot save them all,” David said.
“No,” Samuel replied. “But I can choose which man does not leave.”
He swung the cane.
The hidden blade inside its shaft cut the detonation wire.
David lunged.
Samuel stepped aside.
David fell through the weakened tunnel floor into the flooded chamber below.
Samuel watched him disappear into black water.
He did not follow.
When he returned upstairs, Rosa was holding the recovered archive drive.
Bernadette’s people had failed.
But one worker was missing.
A young dishwasher named Aaron.
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Security footage showed him leaving calmly before the attack.
Around his neck hung a silver bell.
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