The Basement Wolf

Chapter 13. The Price of an Open Door

The hospital looked like it had been built to punish hope. Not even the pretense of comfort—just slabs of white wall under the jaundiced flicker of fluorescents, windows that reflected only more windows, doors with locks that smiled thinly and snapped shut.

Sandra moved through its bowels like a rumor in borrowed skin. The uniform smelled of bleach; the badge clipped to her chest bore a name she had forgotten the second she printed it. A housekeeping cart rolled ahead of her, piled high with folded sheets that wouldn’t fool anyone who cared to check. She prayed no one cared at two a.m.

The smell was the first enemy—chemical sharp, stinging her throat until her breath came shallow. Somewhere a television muttered in static syllables. A man laughed down the hall, high and breaking, the sound of glass under a boot. Another voice crooned to an invisible choir. She kept walking, shoes silent on tile, counting heartbeats and cameras. The old models blinked when the lights stuttered. That was the gap. She’d timed it. She’d practiced until her pulse learned the math.

E-14. Brass numbers dull with age. Just another door, if you didn’t know what sat behind it.

Sandra parked the cart, glanced both ways, swiped the stolen card. The lock gave a soft electronic sigh. She slipped inside and shut the door before the sigh could echo.

White. That was the first impression. The room was the color of erased things. A bed with straps that lay like discarded snakes. A chair bolted to the floor. A camera nesting in the corner, its red eye winking on and off like a warning light in some distant sea.

The girl on the bed wasn’t what Sandra expected. She wasn’t broken. She wasn’t raving. She sat cross-legged in hospital socks, spine straight, hair braided with the precision of someone who refused chaos even in a cage. Her face was young—twenty-three, maybe—but her eyes had the stillness of deep water.

When those eyes lifted, Sandra felt something pass between them. Recognition without reunion. A ledger balanced.

“You came,” the girl said. Her voice didn’t rise or fall. Just landed.

Sandra shut the door all the way. “You’re Mina.”

The girl nodded once.

Sandra crossed the white floor, slow, until the camera was in her periphery and Mina’s face was full in view. “You left that door open.”

Mina’s mouth curved. Not a smile. A confession’s shadow. “I did.”

“Why?” Sandra kept her tone flat, but her pulse was kicking against her ribs. “Why risk this? For me?”

A small shake of the head. “Not for you.” Mina dropped her gaze to her hands, folded in her lap like polite lies. “For what the money could buy.”

Sandra felt the words hit like cold water down her spine. “Money.”

“There was an envelope in my locker. Cash. A note. ‘North door. Three-ten a.m. Key under radiator.’” Mina’s voice stayed calm, as if reciting a weather report. “The key was there. The door opened like it was tired of being a door. So I left it open behind me.” She looked up then, eyes like a line of ink. “And you walked out.”

Sandra tasted metal. “You didn’t know who paid you.”

“No name. No face. Just an envelope that smelled like someone else’s life.” Mina’s fingers twisted together once, then stilled. “Citrus and smoke. Like a coat that never touched rain.”

The description snaked through Sandra’s head, curling around old suspicions, but she locked her face into blankness. “And the money?”

“Dialysis.” Mina said it like a password. “My mother’s. They were three months behind. Insurance was a joke. The kind that kills you laughing.” Her jaw flexed. “So, yes. I took their blood money to clean hers.”

The room seemed to shrink. Sandra’s voice felt like it was made of glass. “And now you’re here.”

“They like neat stories,” Mina said. “Housekeeper helps madwoman escape? Perfect headline. They dragged me out of my dorm before breakfast. Told me I was unstable. Signed papers with words like ‘episode’ and ‘risk.’” She laughed then—short, dry, a match struck in snow. “They told me you were a dream I had when the meds kicked too hard.”

Sandra swallowed fury so thick it burned. “What do they do to you in here?”

Mina’s gaze drifted toward the camera. Its red eyelid winked. “Whatever sounds therapeutic on paper. Cold baths. Sleep cuts. White noise that drills until your teeth hum. Questions until you start answering before they finish asking. When you cry, they call it catharsis.” Her mouth twitched upward, brittle. “I don’t cry anymore. They hate that.”

Sandra wanted to rip the lens from the wall, grind it under her heel. Instead she asked, “Do you regret it?”

Mina tilted her head, braid sliding like rope over her shoulder. “No. Not for a second. Even knowing this? I’d still leave that door open. A door is a promise. I kept mine.”

For the first time, Sandra’s breath stuttered. Gratitude clawed her throat, ugly and raw. “Mina… I can get you out.”

The girl looked at her then, and in her eyes bloomed something dangerously close to pity. “Not tonight.”

“I can come back.” Sandra’s voice hardened, like armor too tight. “I can cut you loose, put you in a car, drive until the map runs out of names.”

“They’d only write your name on the sky,” Mina said softly. “And I’d be the weight that sinks you before you reach him.”

The word struck like a fist in Sandra’s chest. Him. Liam’s face flashed—eyes bright as wet stone, the way he leaned over the pool like he was telling secrets to the water. Her ribs closed around the image like bars.

“You think I’d leave you here?” Sandra whispered.

“I think arithmetic always wins,” Mina said. “You have one sum: your boy. Everything else is subtraction.” She unfolded her legs, set her feet on the cold tile, and stood with the quiet of a cat that’s learned not to wake giants. Up close, she smelled of soap and something bitter—disinfectant clinging to skin like a rumor. “So listen to me. You want to make this count? Then use what I know.”

Sandra forced her fists to unclench. “Tell me.”

“They’re throwing a party,” Mina said. “Next week. House will be crawling with borrowed diamonds and egos that squeak when you shine them. Flowers girl cried about lilies in the laundry room—too many stains. I folded towels and shut my mouth. But I heard: kitchen will need hands. Temp staff. No questions asked.”

Sandra’s breath knotted. Bradley was right. “I’m going in that way.”

“Good.” Mina’s eyes sparked, quick and fierce. “Then remember: east pantry door sticks on the first push. Looks shut. Isn’t. Push twice. Behind it—a service corridor, two bends, then a locked door. New lock. Old hinge. Slip a butter knife under the plate, lift. If the bolt slides, someone’s home.”

Sandra felt each word etch itself into her bones. “Who?”

“I don’t know.” Mina’s voice thinned. “But once, I heard music in there. Not party music. A child’s song. Off-key.”

The blood in Sandra’s veins turned to glass. Liam’s laugh ghosted through her memory like a blade through silk. She swallowed it down. “What else?”

“Alarm panel in the office wing,” Mina said. “Bragging bastard told a plant the code sings like a date. Seven-three-oh-nine. Maybe July third. Maybe September thirtieth. Men like anniversaries they make up to feel important.”

Sandra repeated it under her breath: “7309.”

Mina’s braid slid forward as she tilted her head. “Don’t write it down. Don’t even think it twice in the same room.”

Footsteps scuffed outside—rubber soles, bored pace. Sandra shifted to block the camera’s view of Mina’s mouth, her own shadow stretching long on the floor. “Mina—”

“No more time,” the girl cut in. “You need to go.”

Sandra’s chest felt like iron cooling too fast. “I’ll come back.”

“Then bring a key bigger than this place,” Mina said. And then, softer, “What’s his name?”

Sandra’s throat closed. “Liam.”

Mina nodded, solemn as a vow. “Then go before the clock swallows you.”

Sandra’s hand hovered, wanting to touch, to promise with skin what words couldn’t hold. But the camera blinked, and the world was still a cage. She backed to the door, burned the image of Mina’s braid into her mind, and slipped out with the hush of someone stealing time.

The hallway hit her like a slap of cold bleach. She pushed the cart, walked the numbers, turned the corners when the cameras blinked. Past the lounge where a man argued with a lamp. Past a door humming with a generator’s throat. Past a nurse who didn’t look up from her crossword.

At the exit, the lock buzzed after a heartbeat that lasted a year. The night outside smelled of asphalt and something like freedom, thin and brittle.

She reached the car Bradley had stashed in the blind corner of the lot and slid behind the wheel. For a long moment she just sat, hands on the steering wheel, forehead against the chill of her own breath. Her pulse wrote Mina’s words in Morse against her ribs:

I’d still leave that door open.

Even knowing this.

A door is a promise.

Sandra started the engine when her hands remembered how. The tires whispered over wet pavement. Streetlights strobed across the windshield like interrogators counting lies.

Halfway to the safe turnoff, her phone vibrated. She glanced down. Unknown number. Message:

Seven-three-zero-nine. East pantry. Two pushes.

Sandra’s skin prickled. Mina didn’t have a phone. Bradley wouldn’t use that phrasing. Someone else was watching the same board, moving pieces she couldn’t see.

She typed one word: Received. Deleted it. Typed nothing. Shoved the phone deep in her pocket and drove until the city thinned into roads that smelled of damp earth and diesel.

At her apartment, she locked every lock twice. Dropped her jacket. Pulled a knife from the block and an onion from the basket. And she practiced. Slice after slice until the blade moved like a whisper and the tears in her eyes belonged only to the vegetable. Between cuts she repeated the code, the pantry door, the service hall. Between breaths she whispered Liam’s name until it wasn’t pain anymore. It was a compass.

When sleep came, it brought a dream of doors—hundreds of them, swinging on invisible hinges. Some opened to light. Some to teeth. She walked through all of them with blood on her hands and someone else’s badge on her chest.

And when she woke before dawn, her first thought was the same as her last:

Next Saturday. Sunset. Kitchen door. And this time, I take him home.