Page 44 of Broken Princess
“It’s cool, right?”
“Yeah. Very unique.”
She shrugged. “Not really. A lot of the Californian wineries have massive wine caves and tunnels too,” she said. “The one here is worth checking out, though. I think it’d be a great place to hide things for your scavenger hunt.”
“That’s a good idea. How many tunnels are there altogether?” I asked, brows furrowing.
“There’s one big main tunnel, about a mile long,” she replied. “Then there’s a couple of smaller ones branching off from it. But we don’t use either of them.”
“Hm. Okay.” I made a mental note to check out the tunnels as soon as possible. “Thanks for the idea.”
“Is there anything else I can help with?”
“What can you tell me about the history of this place? Like the name, for instance,” I said. “I mean…. Lilith Hall is kind of a weird name, right? I’ve been wondering about it for a while now.”
“Yeah, it’s really weird,” Gemma replied. “This is hardly a hall.”
“So where did it come from?”
She leaned forward and lowered her voice again. “We aren’t supposed to talk to guests about this, but your family owns the place, so I can tell you,” she said. “Just don’t tell my manager I brought it up. She’ll totally kill me.”
“I won’t say a word.”
She beckoned me over to a nearby wall and pointed at a collage of framed photos. “See that?”
I squinted at the small picture she was referring to. It was a grainy photo of an old French-style manor with gray walls and pointy turrets. “What is it?”
“That’s the original Lilith Hall. It was built in the early nineteenth century, I think.”
“What?” I said, eyes widening. “We’re not in the real one?”
“Nope. The real one is about a mile from here.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Why aren’t you supposed to tell guests about it?”
“Long story,” she said with a rueful smile. “Basically, the managers don’t want guests hearing about it and getting any ideas about sneaking over there. It’s not safe for people to go in.”
“Why not?”
“There was some sort of fire there, ages ago. The exterior was fine, but the inside was totally gutted. I guess your family didn’t want to fix it up for some reason, so they built a new place here,” she said. “Then they decided to stop anyone from going to the old one. It’s understandable, I guess. Imagine how much trouble they’d get into if a guest wandered over and a ceiling collapsed on their head.”
“Yeah. So where is it, exactly?”
She turned and nodded toward the nearest window. “When you arrived, did you see that forest behind all the vineyards?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s in there, about a mile or so from here. Apparently the building is totally surrounded by the forest in a huge ring, so it’s impossible to see from the outside.”
My heart began to pound. That hidden building had to be where my mother and her minions were keeping Willow.
“How would someone get there if they wanted to check it out?” I asked.
Gemma’s brows furrowed. “The only road there is blocked by security guards, as far as I know, so I guess you’d have to walk through the forest. Unless you wanted to take a shortcut through the tunnels.”
Those fucking tunnels again.They were the key to all of this.
“You can access it through them?”
