“Two bunks. They’ve been here.”
“Find the papers.”
I clenched my jaw so hard pain shot into my temples.
They knew exactly what they were looking for.
A flashlight beam slid through a crack at the edge of the hatch but didn’t linger. The rug must have fallen back into place enough to hide the outline. We stayed frozen among Grandpa’s shelves while men stomped over our heads, overturning chairs, dragging things across the floor.
Glass shattered.
One of them laughed softly. “Poor little mountain princes.”
Cody started to rise. I grabbed his sleeve hard enough to stop him.
He glared at me in the dark, furious and humiliated, and I understood it. Hearing strangers tear through the only shelter we had left lit something hot in my own chest too. But anger doesn’t stop a tire iron.
After a few minutes the footsteps shifted toward the back of the cabin.
“Cellar hatch?”
“No.”
Then silence.
A long, dangerous kind of silence.
Cody bent close to my ear. “They’re outside.”
I nodded.
A minute later came the sound I had been dreading: metal scraping wood.
They had found the hatch behind the smokehouse.
“Open it.”
“It’s heavy.”
“Then lift harder.”
The cellar we were hiding in connected only to the cabin floor, not the outside hatch. That was the entire reason Grandpa had built it in two accesses: one hidden by the smokehouse, one concealed in the cabin. If they went down through the outside entrance, they would find the room but not necessarily know we were beneath the cabin hatch.
Unless they searched every inch.
I felt along the wall until my hand found the steel trunk. Behind it, tucked in a corner, was something I’d noticed earlier but hadn’t thought much about: a narrow crawl opening, half hidden by stacked sacks.
I leaned close to Cody. “If they come down, we go through that.”
“To where?”
“No idea.”
He stared at me.
“Fantastic plan,” he breathed.
The outer hatch creaked open.
Cold air rolled in from the other side of the cellar.
Bootsteps descended the stone stairs.
One man. Then another.
Light knifed across the shelves.
“Someone’s been in here.”
“No kidding.”
The beam swept over jars, blankets, tools. It passed within inches of us where we crouched behind the trunk in shadow.
Then it stopped.
“Box is gone.”
“What box?”
“Floor mark. Something was bolted here or sitting here. Recently moved.”
A pause.
“Boss was right.”
The second man swore under his breath.
The first one stepped farther in. His flashlight roamed the room, slower now. Careful. Hunting.
I put a hand on Cody’s shoulder.
He nodded once.
When the beam turned toward the shelves on the opposite wall, we slid silently into the crawl opening and pulled a burlap sack across behind us.
The tunnel was barely high enough to move through on elbows and knees. Dirt pressed cold against my palms. Roots hung from the ceiling. I heard Cody breathing behind me, controlled but fast.
Behind us in the cellar, one of the men said, “There’s got to be more.”
Then the beam flashed directly over the crawl entrance.
Stopped.
“Hold up.”
I moved.
Not carefully now. Fast.
The tunnel angled downward for maybe ten feet, then turned. Ahead, faint air touched my face. An exit. I shoved toward it and burst through a screen of dead leaves into the woods behind the cabin, thirty yards uphill.
Cody came out right after me.
We didn’t speak. We ran.
Branches whipped our faces. Wet leaves slid under our boots. Somewhere behind us a man shouted, “They’re out back!”
A flashlight bounced wild through the trees.
We scrambled uphill toward the ridgeline, lungs burning. I knew these woods better after only a few days than those men did in the dark, but not by much. I nearly went down crossing a washout. Cody caught my jacket and shoved me forward.
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