She pressed her forehead briefly to the cool floor and forced herself to breathe, forcing air into lungs that wanted to seize. Think. Not like a victim. Not like a hostage. Think like Eleanor. Eleanor had faced this same certainty of death and still found a way to outmaneuver it. She had been watched. Trapped.Silenced. And yet she had preserved the truth so carefully that it had survived nearly a century of lies. Eleanor had not panicked. She had planned. She had hidden. She had believed that even if she fell, someone else would rise and carry the truth forward. If Eleanor Blackwood could outwit a killer with nothing but ink, paper, and faith, Annie could out think a machine.
“Annie!”
Jack’s voice cut through the chaos, rough with strain and urgency. She saw him across the lobby, still locked with Sarah Mitchell on the marble floor, federal agents moving in disciplined arcs around them as mercenaries were forced back or taken down. “The red button! Try the red button!” Annie lifted her head and risked a glance toward the command setup. Screens glowed across several desks, cables feeding into a central control unit dense with switches and digital readouts. It looked overwhelming—too many systems, too many possibilities, too little time. But there, unmistakable even in the chaos, was a large red button clearly marked in block letters: EMERGENCY STOP.
Sometimes criminals overcomplicated things. Sometimes they still built in the same fail-safes everyone else did. Annie broke from cover and sprinted, weaving between fallen chairs and shattered glass as federal gunfire cracked behind her. She felt the displacement of bullets more than she heard them, thin invisible lines of danger snapping past her skin. Twenty-eight seconds. Her shoes skidded as she hit the polished floor near the desk. She grabbed the edge, hauled herself upright, and reached for the controls—
—and froze.
Another timer glowed on a secondary monitor. Independent. Active. Unstopped. Twelve seconds. Cold poured through her veins. This was never meant to be disabled easily.Sarah hadn’t built one system. She’d built layers. Redundancies. Insurance. Sarah had planned for someone like her.
“Jack!” Annie shouted, her voice tearing loose from her chest. “There’s a backup timer! Twelve seconds!”
Across the lobby she saw his face change—not fear, not even shock, but something dangerously close to acceptance, as if he were already bracing himself for the ending. No. Not like this. Not when Eleanor’s voice had finally been heard. Not when they had fought this hard to bring truth into the light.
Annie slammed her palm onto the emergency stop. The main display froze at sixteen seconds. But the secondary counter kept going. Eight seconds. The lobby had begun to shift as agents shouted evacuation orders, pulling hostages to their feet, dragging the wounded toward exits. Annie knew what they all knew. There was no time.
Her gaze flew over the backup panel. Fewer controls. Simpler interface. One guarded switch stood out from the rest.
MANUAL OVERRIDE.
She had no idea what it actually did. No schematic. No training. No margin for error. Her hand hovered inches above the switch, her mind screaming with every possible outcome. Manual overrides could disable. They could reset. They could trigger. She thought of Eleanor in the garden, hand pressed to her stomach, whispering promises she didn’t know how to keep. She thought of ink pressed hard into paper because silence was no longer an option. She thought of Jack running into darkness because he loved her too much to let anyone else pay the price.
Eleanor hadn’t known the outcome either.
She had only known what was right.
Annie flipped the switch.
The backup timer stopped at 00:01.
For a heartbeat, the lobby didn’t breathe. Then sound rushed back in—shouting, sobbing, commands, radios cracklingas if the building itself had exhaled. Annie stayed frozen, staring at the halted display, her brain refusing to accept that the world hadn’t ended.
“We need EOD in here now,” Agent Chen was already saying into her radio. “Multiple devices. Countdown interrupted, not disarmed.”
Annie’s legs finally gave way. She sank against the desk, fingers still braced against the equipment as if it might suddenly change its mind. They were alive. The building was standing. Eleanor’s evidence was intact. We did it, Eleanor, she thought, the relief nearly painful. Justice is finally coming.
“Annie.”
Jack was in front of her.
She hadn’t heard him cross the lobby. He stood close now, his injured arm bound, his face pale beneath the grime and sweat, but his eyes were bright with something that stole her breath. “You saved us,” he said quietly. “You saved everyone.” She shook her head as her hand found his. “We did. All of us. Eleanor. You. Me. She started this. We just finished it.”
Agent Chen approached with Sarah Mitchell in restraints, her tailored control finally fractured. Sarah’s hair had come loose. Her blouse was torn. But even now, calculation lingered behind her eyes.
As Agent Chen read her rights, Sarah’s gaze fixed on Annie. “It’s not over,” she said softly. “You think you’ve won, but this goes deeper than you understand. Eleanor’s little story will be a nuisance. Nothing more.”
“It’s not a story,” Annie replied. “And it’s not just hers anymore.”
She pulled the birth certificate from the portfolio. “We know about the baby. Thomas Blackwood Jr. Born March 12, 1927. The rightful heir your great-grandfather murdered.”
For the first time, real fear touched Sarah Mitchell’s face. “That’s impossible,” she whispered. “There was no child.”
“There was,” Annie said steadily. “And we’re going to find out what happened to him.”
As federal agents led Sarah away, Annie felt something finally settle inside her—an ache easing that she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying. Eleanor was no longer a ghost. She was a witness.
But even as the lobby filled with medics and bomb technicians and shaken survivors, Annie knew one truth remained unresolved. Richard was the murderer.
