Chapter 25
My mind went blank.
For one terrible second, there was only Ethan’s face on the phone screen.
His eyes huge.
His cheeks wet.
A strip of tape near his shoulder where someone had tied him too tightly.
Sarah beside him, shaking.
Alive.
But trapped.
Then training took over.
I did not shout.
I did not lunge.
I looked at Vincent and forced my voice to stay steady.
“Where is he?”
Vincent smiled.
“Now you want to negotiate.”
My father looked like he might collapse.
“How?” he whispered. “He was guarded.”
Vincent’s smile widened.
“Guards get distracted when mothers scream.”
Sarah sobbed through the screen.
“I’m sorry. He had someone dressed as an officer. I thought—”
Vincent slapped the side of the car window offscreen.
“Quiet.”
I took one step forward.
“Touch them again and you get nothing.”
Vincent’s eyes brightened.
“There he is. The father.”
Police were listening.
They had to be tracing the call.
They had to be finding the car.
I repeated that in my head.
Trace.
Find.
Move.
Vincent lifted the gun toward my father.
“Thomas knows where the second ledger is.”
My father shook his head.
“I don’t.”
“You do. Clara hid it for you.”
My mother’s name again.
Rain hit the broken sawmill roof.
I looked at my father.
“Think.”
He closed his eyes.
“Clara loved music.”
Vincent screamed, “Do not play riddles with me.”
My father opened his eyes.
“She hid things in music boxes. We had one. A wooden carousel.”
I remembered it suddenly.
My mother’s music box.
It had sat on my dresser after she died.
Then disappeared when I was a teenager.
No.
Not disappeared.
Harold had it.
He once told me he kept a few things from my childhood safe after my apartment flooded years ago.
I spoke carefully.
“I know where it is.”
Vincent’s gun shifted back to me.
“Where?”
“Harold’s storage vault.”
Vincent smiled.
“Call him.”
I called Harold on speaker.
He answered instantly.
“Daniel?”
“The carousel music box,” I said. “My mother’s. Do you still have it?”
Silence.
Then Harold said, “Yes.”
“Open it.”
“Daniel—”
“Open it now.”
Vincent stepped closer.
Harold breathed hard through the line.
I heard movement.
A drawer.
Keys.
A box opening.
Then music.
Tiny.
Distorted.
A lullaby I had not heard since childhood.
Harold whispered, “There is a false bottom.”
My father began to cry.
“What’s inside?” I asked.
Harold’s voice shook.
“A microcassette. And a bank key.”
Vincent’s face changed.
There it was.
The hunger.
The desperate belief that his dead father still owed him something.
“Bring it,” he said.
“Release Ethan first.”
He laughed.
“No.”
“Then no.”
He raised the gun.
My father stepped in front of me.
At the same time, Detective Morales’s voice exploded from the shadows.
“Drop the weapon!”
Vincent fired.
My father jerked backward.
I screamed.
Police returned fire.
Vincent ran into the sawmill.
I dropped beside my father.
Blood spread across his shoulder.
Not his chest.
Shoulder.
He was breathing.
“Go,” he gasped.
“No.”
“Ethan.”
That word moved me.
I ran.
Not after Vincent.
Toward the command van.
Detective Morales shouted into the radio.
They had traced the video signal to a service road near the old quarry.
Units were already moving.
Harold arrived with the music box evidence under police escort, furious and pale.
I jumped into his car before anyone could stop me.
“Drive.”
He did.
The quarry road was mud and darkness.
Police lights flashed ahead.
A black car sat near the edge of the gravel pit.
Doors open.
Sarah was on the ground, crying.
Ethan was in an officer’s arms.
I ran so fast I slipped twice.
“Ethan!”
He turned.
“Dad!”
I caught him and nearly crushed him to my chest.
“I’ve got you.”
He sobbed.
“I remembered what the safety officer said. I kicked the door when they stopped. Mom screamed. Police came.”
I looked at Sarah.
She was shaking, bruised, but alive.
“She protected him,” the officer said.
Sarah looked at me through tears.
“I got one thing right.”
Before I could answer, Detective Morales’s radio crackled.
Vincent had been cornered inside the sawmill.
Then came shouting.
May you like
Then a single gunshot.
Then silence.
