CHAPTER 8 — "Victor's Greatest Sacrifice"
Chunks of concrete crashed onto the prison floor.
Emergency lights flashed crimson.
Smoke poured from broken ventilation shafts.
Panic spread through the underground complex.
The forgotten prisoners rushed toward the exits while David desperately searched for a way to stop the destruction.
"There has to be a control room!" he shouted.
Victor pointed toward a reinforced steel door at the far end of the corridor.
"I've never been inside..."
"But that's where Hale always disappeared."
David kicked the door open.
Inside, dozens of surveillance monitors displayed every corner of Blackridge Prison.
There were hidden cameras in cells...
In medical rooms...
Even inside attorney meeting rooms.
One wall was covered with photographs.
Faces.
Hundreds of them.
Missing inmates.
Whistleblowers.
Former guards.
Journalists.
David's eyes suddenly stopped on one photograph.
It was his older brother.
Officer Michael Walker.
Declared dead twelve years earlier during what officials had called a prison escape.
David's hands began to tremble.
"No..."
"He never escaped."
Victor quietly looked at the file beneath the photograph.
Michael Walker had discovered Hale's operation.
He had been imprisoned underground...
Then executed.
David closed his eyes.
The truth he had searched for all these years had finally been revealed.
Behind them, Deputy Warden Hale appeared with two remaining mercenaries.
"You should've stopped digging."
He raised his pistol.
Before he could fire—
Victor tackled him with all his strength.
The two men crashed through a glass wall.
Hale's pistol slid across the floor.
The remote control flew into the air.
David caught it.
Victor struggled desperately with Hale near the edge of a collapsing platform.
"TURN OFF THE CHARGES!" Victor yelled.
"I'LL HOLD HIM!"
David hesitated.
If he stayed...
He could help Victor.
If he ran...
He might save hundreds of innocent lives.
Victor looked directly at him.
"For once in my life..."
"Let me do something right."
Their eyes met.
David finally nodded.
He sprinted toward the control console.
Behind him, Victor and Hale disappeared into a cloud of dust as another explosion tore through the platform.
The chamber shook violently.
David slammed his hand onto the emergency shutdown switch.
For one endless second...
Nothing happened.
Then the warning siren suddenly stopped.
The countdown disappeared.
Silence.
The explosives had been disabled.
Hundreds of lives had been saved.
But when the dust slowly settled...
The edge of the platform had collapsed into a deep chasm.
David rushed forward.
"Hale!"
No answer.
"Victor!"
Only echoes returned.
The man who had once terrorized an entire prison...
Had vanished into the darkness while saving everyone else.
As rescue teams finally broke through the underground entrance, David quietly picked up the battered prison identification tag lying near the collapsed platform.
It belonged to Victor Carter.
No body was ever found.
And for the first time in Blackridge's history...
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The prison's most feared inmate was remembered not for the lives he destroyed—
—but for the lives he chose to save.
