Chapter 9 - The Fire in the Foundation
Reed lunged down the basement stairs, the beam of his flashlight bouncing wildly against the concrete walls. At the bottom of the steps, near the massive main electrical panel and the HVAC system, stood a shadow.
The figure was wearing a dark raincoat, her hair matted by the damp fog, her face illuminated by the sudden, bright strike of a matches she was holding in her trembling fingers.
It was Vanessa.
Beside her feet lay two large red plastic jerrycans, their contents already spilled across the wooden storage shelves and the main wiring bundles of the house.
"Vanessa!" Reed shouted, stepping forward, his hands lifted in a defensive gesture. "Drop the match! What the hell are you doing?"
"If I can't have this house, Reed, no one can!" Vanessa shrieked, her voice echoing off the concrete walls with the jagged, terrifying pitch of a woman who had completely lost her grip on reality. "Your old mother thinks she won? She thinks she can own the land I walked on? I built this life! I deserved that silver dress! I deserved that boardroom!"
"You didn't build anything, Vanessa! You tortured my mother!" Reed pressed, taking a slow, calculated step closer, his eyes locked onto the burning match in her hand. The wood of the match was already curling, the flame getting dangerously close to her silver-painted fingernails. "There are babies upstairs, Vanessa. Your babies. Noah and Lily are in the nursery right now."
"They're your babies!" she screamed, a tear cutting through the heavy makeup on her face. "They look like her! They look like your family! You took everything from me! You froze my life! Now I’m going to freeze yours!"
She dropped her hand, intending to toss the match into the puddle of gasoline at her feet.
In a fraction of a second, Reed lunged forward, his large frame colliding with hers before the flame could touch the floor. He grabbed her wrist, twisting it upward as the match went flying into the dark, landing harmlessly in a dry pile of concrete dust near the far wall.
Vanessa fought like a wild animal, her fingernails clawing at his face, her teeth sinking into his shoulder as they tumbled to the floor. But Reed’s strength, forged by years of hard labor in his youth before the corporate success, was absolute. He pinned her arms behind her back, pulling a heavy zip-tie from the maintenance workbench nearby and securing her wrists with a sharp, definitive zip.
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The heavy thud of footsteps echoed down the basement stairs. Two private security officers, who had been alerted by the main gate’s perimeter breach alarm, came rushing into the room with their flashlights drawn, followed closely by Detective Harmon, whom Mara Chen had placed on high-alert weeks ago.
"We have her, Detective," Reed said, his chest heaving as he stood up, looking down at the woman who had once been his wife, now sobbing hysterically in a puddle of spilled gasoline on the cold basement floor. "Take her out of my house."
