Chapter 6
“You thought this was about Grant,” he said. “You thought this was about money.”
I walked toward him until the guards tightened their grip.
He looked up at me.
“The border case was never the mission,” he whispered. “It was the distraction.”
My phone buzzed.
A message appeared from an unknown number.
One image.
A room with red walls.
A child’s yellow butterfly clip lying on the floor.
Below it, a sentence:
You came home too late.
I looked down at Lily, shaking in my arms, and understood that the nightmare had not begun when I opened my front door.
It had begun weeks ago.
Inside my house.
Under my name.
With people I had trusted holding the keys.
And somewhere beyond Grant, beyond Vanessa, beyond Mercer, someone had touched my child’s life and left a message for me in red.
I raised my eyes.
“Daniel,” I said, my voice no longer sounding human, “burn every wall between me and whoever sent that.”
Daniel nodded once.
Grant whispered, “Evelyn, please. You don’t know what they’ll do.”
I looked at the man I had married.
“No,” I said. “They don’t know what I’ll do.”
Outside, the first police sirens finally rose in the distance.
But inside the house, beneath the marble floor, behind a locked steel door only my father and I had known existed, an old emergency monitor flickered awake by itself.
On the screen appeared a live feed.
A red room.
An empty chair.
And Lily’s missing nanny, Mrs. Alvarez, bound but alive, staring straight into the camera with one bruised eye open.
Her lips moved silently.
May you like
I read the words before the screen went black.
“She is not the only child.”
