Her eyes filled.
“I’m sorry I let you be a ghost in their lives.”
A crash sounded off-screen.
Claire looked toward the door.
Then back at the camera.
“If they take me, don’t trade the boys. No matter what they offer. No matter what they say I signed.”
She reached forward.
The screen went black.
For a long moment, nobody moved.
Then Holt’s phone rang.
He answered, listened, and looked at me.
“What?” I demanded.
His face had gone hard.
“The office lockdown was breached.”
The world narrowed.
“The boys?”
“Margaret got them to the private safe room.”
I started toward the door.
Holt caught my arm.
“There’s more.”
I turned.
He held out his phone.
A message had arrived from an unknown number.
No words.
Just a photograph.
Lucas and Noah sat in the safe room, frightened but unharmed.
Behind them, reflected faintly in the glass wall, stood Margaret.
And beside Margaret stood Paul Hargrove.
Alive.
Smiling.
Another message appeared.
Bring the key, the drive, and your sons to the old Sterling estate by midnight.
Then a final image loaded.
Claire.
Bound to a chair.
Eyes open.
Alive.
And around her neck hung my mother’s pearl necklace—the one buried with her twenty years ago.
My blood turned cold for an entirely new reason.
Because standing behind Claire, one hand resting gently on her shoulder, was a woman I had mourned since I was fifteen.
My mother.