Page 47 of The Breath Before Forever

“More what?”

His voice echoed from inside the hole.

“Secret rooms, or—safes hidden under floors,” Vera clarified.

Vaslav’s steps came to a stop, but only briefly. He padded down the remaining stairs, but the pause in his reply told her what he would say before he could do it. “There may or may not be something that could be considered a safe room in the basement.”

Vera’s brow puckered with her contemplation. “May or may not be?”

“There is, it isn’t particularly safe after eighteen or so hours. There’s practically no air exchange down there. You’ll slowly run out of oxygen. It’s a last resort, yeah, but only if needed.”

Well, then.

“Besides, I didn’t have it installed to use myself—well,” Vaslav added with a chuckle. “Not for my safety, no? It’s been well-used, nonetheless.”

There was something about the pleased cadence of his dark tone—twisting it in a joke she clearly couldn’t understand—that kept Vera from asking more about the room in the basement. She had even less of a desire to know what he had used it for now.

“The panel mirror built into the wall in the room across from the den,” Vaslav said.

Vera could visualize the decoration—strange to be at the far end of a small hallway in the large studio space—he talked about. “What about it?”

“That’ll open up and take you down to it. If you can get the control panel to work.”

Huh.

“Anything else?” Vera questioned.

“Not at the moment. I’ll keep you informed.”

Vaslav offered the news as if he already had something in mind that could soon come to fruition. What could she say to that?

The loud screech of metal against concrete sent Vera rising from the oyster-back decorative chair that typically sat unused in the corner of Vaslav’s den. Standing gave her just enough room to see him at the bottom of the dark pit. While he’d turned on a handful of pot lights in the den, the main fixtures remained off, and kept the large space blanketed in shadows.

Nonetheless, she could see the door he’d pulled open. A door as large as he was tall, and at least six inches thick. Made of steel, the door couldn’t be easy to pull back to expose what lay behind, but Vaslav did it without complaint.

Or even a grunt.

Hell, he couldn’t carry on a conversation without tossing in one or two of those. Vera couldn’t see from her position what he dug for at the very bottom of the large safe, but by the time he turned around, he didn’t bother with closing the door before climbing the stairs.

At the top, he waved what he found.

A file.

All that work to move the chairs and desk, not to mention roll back the rug, for a legal-sized file he kept at the bottom of a safe under the floor. Did he have it like that so the work involved to get it to might deter himself, or someone else? Or was he just protecting what was inside the file? Knowing her husband the way she thought she did, Vera suspected his reasonings featured a bit of both things mixed together.

Vaslav waved the file, muttering, “Give me a minute. There’s more than what I need here. It keeps everything else in one spot, yes?”

He wasn’t looking for an actual response, so Vera took her seat once more in the chair in the corner while Vaslav headed for his desk. Once he sat behind the desk with the file open and a pile of papers spilled out, it was like the hole in the floor didn’t exist.

Yet, Vera couldn’t look away.

“I can’t believe that’s been here the whole time,” she said.

“Mmm.” Vaslav sighed while discarding paper after paper in a second pile. “I emptied it last month. There’s nothing very interesting or usable down there now. Maybe I’ll build it back up, or maybe I won’t.”

“With what?”

Vaslav hesitated before discarding the next pile of papers that weren’t what he was looking for, eventually saying, “Things.”