The gallery walls seemed to tilt, the ambient hum of the air conditioning stretching into a deafening, metallic whine. Elena stared down at the minuscule crimson bead on her skin, her breath catching in her throat as a cold, electric prickle raced up her forearm. The threat wasn’t a bluff; a heavy, leaden numbness was already creeping down her fingers, making the encrypted flash drive in her palm feel impossibly heavy.
Blackwood Point. The old abandoned lighthouse jutted out over the churning Atlantic, miles past the city limits where cell service died and police radios couldn’t pierce the coastal fog. Whoever had slipped past her security, bypassed the FBI’s perimeter, and slipped that needle into her skin during the chaos wasn’t just a shadow—they were someone who knew her every move.
She turned sharply toward the glass doors, desperate to flag down Agent Vance before his SUV pulled away into the storm. But through the rain-streaked windows, the red tail lights of the federal convoy were already dissolving into the gloom. The FBI had taken Victoria and Julian, leaving Elena entirely alone in the hollowed-out shell of the gallery.
A sharp, violent cramp ripped through her lower abdomen.
Elena doubled over, clutching her stomach with her left hand while her right arm hung limp and useless, already heavy as iron. Panic, cold and razor-sharp, clawed at her throat. Twelve hours? At the rate the numbness was spreading, she wouldn’t have two. The neurotoxin was engineered to target the nervous system—and her unborn child shared every heartbeat with her.
She forced herself upright, her mind racing past the terror to calculate her next move. The real ledger wasn’t on the flash drive in her pocket; she had transferred the encrypted partitions to a secure cloud server minutes before Victoria cornered her. If she went to the feds, Vance would lock her down in protective custody, and the antidote would never reach her in time. If she went alone to Blackwood Point, she was walking straight into a trap set by an invisible enemy.
Her phone buzzed violently in her palm once more, breaking the silence of the empty hall.
Leaving so soon? Check the gallery security monitor, Elena. You have company.
Elena’s head snapped toward the recessed security desk in the corner of the room. The multi-panel monitor, usually displaying feeds of the empty lobby and the back alleys, flickered. One by one, the exterior cameras went black, replaced by a single, live interior feed from the private basement vault—a vault she knew for a fact required Julian’s biometric thumbprint and Victoria’s override code to open.
Yet, on the grainy monochrome screen, the heavy steel door of the vault was swinging slowly open. And stepping out from the shadows into the vault’s dim emergency lighting was a tall figure wearing a coat identical to the one Agent Vance had worn just moments before.