By the time the baby in first class had screamed for nearly ninety minutes, his powerful father had snapped at everyone who tried to help, and the entire cabin had surrendered to the noise. Then I walked up from premium economy and told him something nobody expected: his son wasn't rejecting food. He was searching for the one kind of comfort I could give him.

I moved before I could even draw breath, sprinting through the library doors and racing up the grand marble staircase two steps at a time. The echoes of my daughter's terrified sobs tore through the vast halls of the villa.

"Maya!" I screamed, bursting through the mahogany doors of the primary guest suite.

The balcony French doors had been shattered inward, shards of glass glistening like crushed ice across the Persian rug. The cold night wind from the lake whipped the sheer curtains into violent white specters.

Maya was cowering in the corner between the wardrobe and the wall, clutching her stuffed rabbit against her chest, her face pale and streaked with tears. Standing near the shattered glass was Lev, his suppressed Glock raised, scanning the dark tree canopy of the terrace below.

"Mommy!" Maya shrieked, lunging toward me.

I dropped to my knees, wrapping my arms tightly around her small, trembling body, burying my face in her hair. "I'm here, baby. I've got you. You're safe."

"A bad man was at the window," Maya sobbed into my shoulder, her little fingers digging into my shirt. "He tapped on the glass and said... he said Daddy was coming to take me home."

A dark, suffocating fury, unlike anything I had ever felt, ignited in my blood. Christian walked into the room, his face a mask of absolute, murderous calm. He glanced at the shattered glass, then at Lev.

"Status," Christian commanded, his voice deadly quiet.

"Single operative, highly trained," Lev reported, lowering his weapon slightly but keeping his eyes locked on the perimeter. "He breached the outer water gate using scuba propulsion. He dropped an encrypted communication drive before jumping from the terrace into a waiting speedboat. Perimeter sensors were bypassed from the inside."

"Inside?" Christian’s eyes narrowed into slits of lethal steel. "Victoria."

Lev nodded grimly. "Her arrival was a diversion to draw our interior security toward the front gates."

Christian walked over to the shattered doorway, picking up a small, black titanium flash drive from the stone threshold using a linen handkerchief. He plugged it into a rugged tablet handed to him by Lev.

A video feed auto-played on the screen.

The face that appeared made my stomach violently heave. Marcus Vance sat in a sunlit, high-rise office, wearing a bespoke suit, a glass of bourbon in his hand, and that familiar, sadistic smirk plastered across his handsome face.

"Hello, Clara darling," Marcus’s voice oozed from the speakers, smooth and venomous. "Did you really think a billionaire’s gated playground could hide you from me? You always were pathetic at running. Enjoy your little Cinderella fantasy while you can, sweetheart. Because Christian Sterling isn't protecting you out of the goodness of his heart. Ask him about Project Genesis. Ask him whose biological material was used to synthesize baby Noah’s embryonic culture before his precious wife died."

Marcus laughed—a cold, sickening sound that echoed off the high ceilings.

"You didn't just stumble onto his flight, Clara. Noah isn't just his son. He's yours. See you soon, wife."

The screen went black.

The room seemed to tilt sideways. The oxygen vanished from my lungs. I looked down at Maya, then my mind flashed to baby Noah sleeping in the nursery down the hall—his dark hair, the exact curve of his upper lip, the immediate, overwhelming, biological pull my body had felt the moment I heard his desperate cry on the airplane.