Chapter 7: Laundry Room Alliance
The afternoon sun beat down heavily against the tall glass windows of the estate, casting long, geometric shadows across the immaculate marble floors of the grand hallway. Down in the basement laundry room, the rhythmic hum of the industrial washing machine provided a temporary wall of sound that kept our voices safe from prying ears. Elena slipped through the heavy fire door a few minutes after two o'clock, still wearing her red silk dress, though the hem was slightly dusty from walking the grounds with Marcus's visiting associates.
"He’s locked himself in the study to take calls," Elena whispered, leaning back against a stack of folded white linens. Her eyes were bright with a desperate, nervous energy. "We have less than three hours before the evening gala guests start arriving. Once the downstairs fills up, moving through the main corridors will be impossible."
"Then we use the service stairwell behind the pantry," I said, pulling a small, black USB flash drive from my apron pocket and holding it up so she could see it. "I found this in the supply closet. It has enough storage to back up every document in that safe. But once we plug it into his desk terminal, we'll only have a few minutes before the system alerts him to an external drive connection."
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Elena nodded, her expression grim and resolute. "I know the password to his terminal. He uses our daughter Lily’s birthday, but he reverses the digits so nobody guesses it easily. I'll type it in while you pull the physical files from the safe. We have to work fast, Aria. If he catches us down there this time, he won't just threaten us—he'll make sure we disappear."
We spent the next twenty minutes mapping out every step of the operation, coordinating our movements down to the exact second. We needed to ensure that Lily was safely tucked away in the nursery with her nanny, far away from the impending fallout. As Elena explained the layout of the digital server hidden inside the study's built-in bookshelves, a sharp, sudden rap sounded on the heavy oak door outside the laundry room. We both froze, the hum of the washing machine suddenly sounding deafeningly loud in the quiet room. A heavy envelope slid underneath the crack of the door, bearing no return address—only my name written in sharp, aggressive block letters.
