Chapter 6 - The Girl Who Disappeared
Lena vanished before noon.
One minute she was in the secure apartment, sitting on the edge of the couch with a blanket around her shoulders. The next, the bathroom window was open, the hallway camera was disabled, and the girl who had seen too much was gone.
Ivy blamed herself immediately.
“She ran because she heard the threat.”
Ronan stood in the bathroom doorway, staring at the open window.
“No.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know fear.” He looked at the scratched window frame. “This wasn’t fear. Someone helped her out.”
Matteo entered with a laptop.
“Camera blackout lasted four minutes. Same pattern as the wine cellar.”
Grayson cursed under her breath.
“Inside access.”
Ronan’s eyes darkened.
“There were only nine people who knew she was here.”
Matteo looked sick.
“I’ll vet everyone again.”
“You already did.”
“I’ll do it better.”
Ivy moved toward the door.
Ronan blocked her without touching her.
“Where are you going?”
“To find Lena.”
“You don’t know where she is.”
“She has a sick mother. She’ll go home.”
“And if that is exactly where they expect you to go?”
“I’m not staying here while another girl gets hurt because of me.”
“She is not hurt because of you.”
Ivy laughed once. It came out sharp and bitter.
“Rich people always say that after poor people pay the bill.”
Ronan flinched.
Good, she thought.
Then hated herself for thinking it.
Grayson stepped between them before the argument could become something worse.
“Ivy, listen to me. If Lena goes home, we’ll find her faster with patrol units than you will in a cab.”
“I know her address.”
“So do the people who took her.”
Ivy froze.
Noah came from the kitchen, Eli close behind him.
“We’re going with you,” Noah said.
“No, you’re not.”
“Ivy—”
“No.” Her voice broke. “I need you safe. Please. Just once, let me know where you are and safe.”
Noah’s anger collapsed into fear.
He nodded.
Ronan turned to two guards.
“No one enters. No one leaves. Not without Grayson’s approval.”
Grayson arched a brow.
“My approval?”
“You’re the law in this room.”
“Funny how you remember that when convenient.”
“I’m learning.”
She gave him a hard look.
“You’d better learn fast.”
They found Lena’s mother in a fourth-floor apartment above a bakery in Queens.
The door was unlocked.
The oxygen machine beside the couch hummed quietly. A half-folded blanket lay on the floor. Medication bottles lined the coffee table.
Lena’s mother, Marisol Alvarez, was gone.
Ivy gripped the doorframe.
“No.”
Grayson checked the rooms while Ronan remained near Ivy, not crowding, not speaking.
That restraint was starting to become unbearable.
Ivy wanted him to command something. Break something. Threaten the sky.
Instead, he waited for her to stand on her own feet.
Matteo found the note on the kitchen counter.
One line.
BRING IVY TO THE OLD GRAVES ESTATE BY 8 P.M.
Beneath it was Lena’s name tag.
Ivy took it with shaking fingers.
Ronan said, “No.”
She turned on him.
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“I know you’re going to offer yourself.”
“They want me.”
“They want bait.”
“Then I’ll be bait.”
“No.”
The word echoed.
Ivy’s face hardened.
“You keep saying that as if it ends the conversation.”
Ronan’s eyes flashed.
“Because I am not letting you walk into a trap.”
“You don’t let me do anything.”
The air snapped between them.
Matteo suddenly looked very interested in the ceiling.
Grayson folded her arms.
Ronan lowered his voice.
“I am trying to keep you alive.”
“I have been keeping myself alive since I was fifteen.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I know enough to understand you should not have had to.”
That stopped her.
The anger did not vanish, but it lost its footing.
Ronan looked at the note.
“The Graves estate is empty. Charles has been trying to sell it for years. Too much scandal attached.”
“Good place to hide someone,” Grayson said.
“Or kill someone,” Matteo added.
Ivy’s hand tightened around Lena’s name tag.
“Then we call your detective friends. Your guards. Everybody.”
Grayson shook her head.
“If we storm in blind and they have hostages, people die.”
Ronan looked at Ivy.
“They asked for you because they think I will follow.”
“Will you?”
“Yes.”
The honesty was instant.
Too instant.
Ivy looked away first.
At seven forty-five that evening, Ivy sat in the back of a black sedan wearing a wire beneath her sweater and a bulletproof vest under her coat. Her bandaged shoulder burned every time she moved.
Ronan sat beside her.
He had argued against her involvement for two hours.
He lost.
Not because Ivy convinced him it was safe.
Because she convinced him it was her choice.
That difference seemed to cost him something.
Grayson’s voice crackled in Ivy’s earpiece.
“Remember, keep them talking. We move only when we confirm both hostages are alive.”
Ivy touched the tiny microphone near her collar.
“Understood.”
Ronan looked at her.
“You do not go inside alone.”
“The note said—”
“I don’t care what the note said.”
“Ronan.”
He went still at the sound of his name.
She had not meant to say it.
Now it was there.
His voice softened.
“Ivy.”
The car slowed outside the old Graves estate.
It loomed at the end of a wet driveway, windows dark, ivy choking the brick walls as if the house had been trying to disappear into itself.
Ivy remembered Eleanor’s roses.
Dead now.
The front door opened before they knocked.
Victor Valez stood inside, smiling.
“Well,” he said. “Look at my runaway girl.”
Ronan stepped out of the shadows behind Ivy.
Victor’s smile faltered.
“I said bring Ivy.”
Ronan’s voice was cold.
“She brought me.”
Victor laughed, but there was fear in it.
Behind him, someone whimpered.
Lena.
Ivy stepped forward.
“Let them go.”
Victor tilted his head.
“Oh, sweetheart. You still think this is about them?”
A second figure emerged from the dark hallway.
Charles Graves.
He was older than Ivy remembered, but the same rot lived in his eyes.
“You ruined everything,” he said to her.
Ivy’s pulse roared.
“You killed Eleanor.”
Charles smiled.
“She was already dying.”
“So you helped?”
“She was going to expose me.”
Ronan’s eyes sharpened.
Ivy realized Charles did not know about the wire.
Good.
Keep him talking.
Charles stepped closer.
“She wanted to give her money to nurses, shelters, strangers. People like you. She forgot family is blood.”
“Blood didn’t make you love her.”
“No. But it made her money mine.”
A soft click sounded from Ronan’s coat.
His own recorder.
Victor’s eyes darted toward him.
“Enough.”
He grabbed Ivy by the arm and yanked her forward.
Pain exploded through her injured shoulder.
Ronan moved.
So did the lights.
The entire estate went black.
Someone screamed.
Gunfire cracked once.
May you like
Then again.
Ivy hit the floor hard as chaos erupted around her.
