“You’re coming,” I tell the screen, my voice shaking, desperate to believe the lie I am constructing. “You’re playing along until you can strike.”
I glare at the locked door. Cassian. He’s manipulating everything. He thinks he can break me by making me doubt my father.
“I see what you’re doing,” I hiss into the silence, wiping the tears from my face with a trembling hand. “It won’t work.”
I roll onto my back, staring at the ceiling. I won’t cry. I won’t give the monster the satisfaction of breaking me. My father is out there. He’s planning. And when he comes, he won’t just bring the police; he’ll bring hell.
I close my eyes, and I start counting again.
One. Two. Three.
I will count until he opens that door.
10
CASSIAN
The basement Operations Room is the brain of the estate, buried twenty feet beneath the granite shelf of the cliff. I stand behind Varro, my arms crossed over my chest, staring at the frozen image on the main monitor.
It’s been ten minutes since the broadcast ended. Ten minutes since Judge William Hale looked into a camera lens, smiled with the warmth of a grandfather, and told the world his daughter was doing yoga in Bali.
The image on the screen is paused on that smile. It’s a terrifying thing. It reaches his eyes, crinkling the corners, projecting stability and charm. There is no stress in his jaw or tension in his neck. He doesn’t look like a man whose only child has vanished.
“He’s good,” Varro mutters, tapping a key to cycle the feed. “I almost believed him. The ‘weary father’ act plays well with the demographics.”
“He’s not acting,” I say, my voice low in the acoustic dead space of the bunker. “He’s managing.”
“Managing what? The narrative?”
“The liability. He’s isolating us.”
I turn away from the screen, pacing the length of the room. My boots echo on the sealed concrete.
The Judge’s move was brilliant. Cold, precise, and entirely sociopathic. By claiming she’s in Bali with “no phones,” he has explained her silence for weeks, maybe months. He has frozen any investigation before it could even start. He has ensured that no one is looking for a missing girl or a body.
And he did something worse. He signaled to me, and to anyone else listening, that he is playing the long game.
“By publicly stating she’s safe, he’s taken a ransom off the table,” I say, stopping at the map table. “He’s not going to pay. He’s going to strike.”
“He knows we’ve got her,” Varro says, spinning his chair to face me. “The timing of the hit, the missing car, the silence. He has to know.”
“He knows she’s gone,” I agree. “And he knows who he sent to the museum.”
“So why hasn’t he called?” He gestures to the secure phone on the console, a black brick that has remained silent for three days. “Why isn’t he begging? Why isn’t he threatening?”
“Because he isn’t going to negotiate.”
I look down at the topographic map, where the green cliff lines look like the teeth of a trap.
“He’s stalling,” I say, running a hand through my hair. “He’s buying time to figure out a way to extract her without involving the Feds. He knows if he sends a SWAT team, I release the evidence, so he’s boxed in.”
Varro shakes his head. “I don’t like it. The silence is too absolute. If he were scrambling, we’d hear chatter. This feels... settled.”
“He’s a Judge,” I say. “He thinks in precedents and risk management. He’s probably sitting in his study right now, trying to negotiate with himsel?—”
BEEP.
A sharp tone cuts through the server hum. It isn’t the phone or the news feed—it’s the seismic array.
