CHAPTER 17: SOPHIE'S RIDDLE
CHAPTER 17: SOPHIE'S RIDDLE
The basement vault was a reinforced concrete bunker beneath the old brick foundation building. I locked the heavy steel door from the inside, the deadbolts clicking firmly into place. Outside, the muffled sounds of footsteps and breaking wood continued. Sophie sat on a metal bench, clutching her old teddy bear tightly. She wasn't crying. The bravery she had found after the wedding was still there, locked behind her eyes. "Mom, look at this," she said quietly, pointing to the leather diary I had tucked into my jacket pocket. "The drawing on the back cover." I pulled the diary out, turning it over under the dim beam of my phone's flashlight. On the inside of the back cover, our mother had sketched a small riddle. A series of numbers arranged in a circle. 20-06-14. The date Hannah left. But beneath the numbers, there was a secondary sequence written in faded pencil. 9-14-11. "Sophie, what do these numbers mean?" I asked, my heart racing. "Grandma used to play a game with me before she went to the hospital," Sophie said softly. "She said if I ever got lost, I should count the steps from the front door to the secret garden." "The numbers match the floor tiles in the lobby, Mom." Suddenly, my laptop—which was synced to Hannah's network—pinged with an error message. UPLOAD INTERRUPTED. SECONDARY SECURITY KEY REQUIRED. Hannah was trapped upstairs, cut off from the main server. The secondary key wasn't a digital password. It was the physical sequence hidden beneath the floorboards of the foundation itself. The very building our mother had donated to the city before her passing. Christian wasn't looking for the drive in the warehouse. He knew the physical backup was buried beneath our feet.
