The Mafia Boss's Mute Mother: When My Coworkers Pranked Me Into Her Room, One Secret Sign Revealed I Hold the Dead Heir's Final Confession! / Chapter 22 / 49

Chapter 22 - Into the Sub-Terranean LabyrinthThe descent into the sub-basement felt like stepping backward into a cold, forgotten century.

The air grew damp, thick with the scent of stagnant water, wet limestone, and ancient rust. My flashlight beam cut through the pitch-black darkness, sweeping across crumbling brick walls and rusted iron pipes that hissed softly with escaping steam.

According to the digital schematic I had memorized on the console, Sector Nine was located approximately three hundred yards beneath the northern perimeter wall, directly adjacent to an old municipal runoff junction.

As I crept forward along the narrow concrete walkway, the faint sound of scraping metal echoed through the tunnel ahead.

Scratch. Tap. Squeak.

I flicked off my primary flashlight, plunging myself into absolute, suffocating darkness, relying entirely on night-vision training and the faint ambient glow of emergency exit conduits further down the line.

Rounding a sharp concrete corner, I pressed my back flat against the damp wall, peering into a dimly lit vaulted chamber.

In the center of the damp room stood a makeshift workstation: a folding card table illuminated by a single battery-powered lantern, a burnt-down candle, and an open laptop plugged directly into a spliced fiber-optic cable tapped straight into the city’s main data trunk line.

Sitting at the table, frantically typing lines of code onto the screen, was a figure in a stained gray hoodie.

“I told you, the firewall is too thick,” a raspy, panicked voice muttered to himself. “If I don't route the proxy through the Cayman server before midnight, the whole offshore portfolio resets to zero—”

“Step away from the keyboard, Wesley,” I said, stepping smoothly out of the shadows, the barrel of my Beretta locked firmly onto the center of his chest.

Wesley shrieked, flying backward off his folding stool. He crashed hard onto the concrete floor, his eyes wide with stark, unadulterated terror as he stared up at the dark barrel of the gun.

“Thea?!” Wesley choked out, scrambling backward until his spine hit a stack of empty crates. “How... how did you find me? I took the bus out of Ashport weeks ago!”

“You took a bus to the city limits, circled back under cover of fog, and crawled back into the estate through the one set of blueprints Uncle Victor forgot to hand over before he fled,” I stated coldly, walking forward and kicking his open laptop across the floor out of his reach. “You thought you could siphon off the remaining micro-transactions from the offshore accounts while everyone was distracted by the wedding.”

“I was desperate!” Wesley wept, raising his trembling hands into the air. “Victor promised me a percentage of the European shipping lines if I left a backdoor open in the estate’s security firewall! Please, Thea—don't tell Ronan! He’ll feed me to the dogs!”

“Ronan doesn't need to know,” I whispered, stepping right over him, my boots clicking sharply against the stone floor.