Always You by Caroline Khoury

Author:Caroline Khoury [Khoury, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529159363
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK

Chapter 21

Now we are twenty-eight

The only light that guided me was from the moon. I zipped up my jacket to my chin and pulled the hood over my head, tugging the drawstrings tight.

I didn’t need anyone’s help. As soon as I had arrived at the Kition archaeological site after midnight, I noticed one of the buckets that I had used to collect earth had been left out. I stood on the base, shifting my weight from side to side to check it was steady. Stretching my arms, it was easy to open the window and reach for the latch to open it wider. A push on the balls of my feet propelled me and I swung my leg up so I could climb inside. It was a short drop down onto the cabinet below and then a jump to the floor.

I stood in the room, my breathing rapid, trying to swallow away the fear.

After the heated discussion with Ash at the beach bar, he had walked off and I hadn’t followed. I wasn’t chasing a ghost. I was trying to right a wrong.

I pressed the torch button on my phone and flicked it over the cabinet. Opening the drawer revealed the stack of keys I had seen before. I tried each one in the back door’s lock. Lucky number seven turned in the hole. I flashed the torch into the darkness. It was an empty room. My heart sank. Moving my phone, illuminating each wall, it finally highlighted something. A safe? There was another lock. An opening for a smaller key this time. I checked the hoop and tried a few until it unlocked. Inside lay some documents – receipts similar to the ones I had seen in the filing cabinet and underneath them was a logbook.

As I flipped to the last page of entries, my hands began to tremble. My mother’s writing was staring back at me. There it was. The date and time of her discovery. This was it. This proved she had been the one to discover the tomb.

A sound startled me, and I dropped my phone; the light extinguished.

‘Lina?’

It was Ash. What was he doing here?

‘Lina, are you in there?’

‘Yes,’ I said, reaching for the door. But it didn’t open when I turned the handle.

‘Lina, I heard a car pull up. You’d better get out of there.’

Shit. I wrenched the handle again and again and felt underneath it only to discover there was no hole. ‘Can you open it from the outside?’

The handle shifted but the door remained shut. I reached to the floor, but there was no gap, no possible way to slip the key under.

‘I’m going to have to break it down,’ Ash said. ‘Stand as far back as you can, OK? I’ll count to three.’

‘OK,’ I said, reaching back to the floor to find my phone, still clutching the logbook. As my fingers grazed the screen, I could feel ridges in the glass, and it didn’t come to life when I pressed the side switch.

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