Chapter 3 - THE MEN INSIDE THE GATE
For one second, the entire house disappeared.
Then the emergency lights came on.
Red.
Dim.
Wrong.
Ivy screamed.
Gideon pulled her behind him as Daniel drew a handgun from beneath his jacket.
“Safe room,” Daniel said.
“No.”
“Gideon.”
“My security was compromised with my credential. You want me to put her in a room controlled by the same system?”
Daniel hated that Gideon was right.
A burst of gunfire cracked somewhere outside.
Not loud.
Suppressed.
Professional.
Daniel touched his earpiece.
“Reed to south team. Lock interior corridor three. Nobody approaches the east wing.”
A voice answered through static.
“Copy.”
Then another voice cut in.
“Sir, garage breach.”
Gideon's eyes narrowed.
“They know the house.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Daniel didn't answer.
Because the answer was obvious.
They had plans.
Codes.
Credential architecture.
They knew the blind spots.
Whoever had come for Ivy had not learned those things from the street.
Gideon picked up the girl.
She wrapped both arms around his neck.
Albert was crushed between them.
“Where are we going?” she whispered.
“Somewhere people can't see us.”
The estate had been renovated sixteen years earlier, back when Gideon believed security was about protecting money.
Then Juniper was born.
Security became about protecting a person.
Behind the library's eastern shelf was a mechanical release no digital system controlled.
Gideon pulled it.
The shelf shifted.
Ivy's eyes widened despite the terror.
“Secret door?”
“Rich people are ridiculous.”
Even Daniel looked at him.
“Now?”
“It calms children.”
“It doesn't calm me.”
“Nothing calms you.”
Another gunshot.
Closer.
Daniel entered first.
Concrete stairs led downward.
Gideon followed with Ivy.
The shelf closed behind them.
Darkness swallowed the sound.
The passage had been built as a Prohibition-era wine route long before Gideon bought the estate. He had reinforced it and extended it toward the old carriage house.
Only six people knew it existed.
One was dead.
Juniper had called it the pirate tunnel.
Gideon hated remembering that.
He also needed the memory.
It reminded him that the house had once contained laughter.
They moved quickly.
Halfway down the tunnel, Ivy started shaking.
Not crying.
Shaking.
“Cold?” Gideon asked.
“No.”
“Scared?”
“No.”
A seven-year-old's lie.
He lowered her.
Daniel kept watch ahead while Gideon crouched.
“You can be scared.”
“I wasn't supposed to leave the bench.”
“Your mother told you to stay because she thought it was the safest place.”
Ivy nodded.
“It stopped being safe.”
“She'll be mad.”
“No.”
“You don't know.”
Gideon did know one thing.
“No mother who loves her child gets angry because her child survived.”
Ivy stared at him.
Then asked the question he had been avoiding.
“Did Juniper survive?”
The tunnel seemed to narrow.
Gideon shook his head.
“No.”
“So sometimes kids don't.”
Daniel looked back.
Gideon wished he could hate the question.
Instead he hated that Ivy had reason to ask it.
“Sometimes people die,” he said. “But that doesn't mean we stop trying to keep the people who are still here alive.”
Ivy looked toward the darkness.
“Will you keep Mama alive?”
“I'll try.”
“Hard?”
“As hard as I know how.”
That satisfied her more than a lie would have.
They continued.
At the carriage house, Daniel cracked open the hidden door.
Empty.
Their backup vehicle waited beneath a canvas cover.
An old black Range Rover not tied into the estate's primary fleet software.
Daniel checked beneath it for a tracker before opening the doors.
“You drive,” he told Gideon.
“You hate when I drive.”
“I hate you more when armed men are in your house.”
Gideon put Ivy in the rear seat.
As he fastened her seatbelt, she grabbed his wrist.
“Albert.”
The stuffed rabbit was missing.
Gideon looked back toward the passage.
“You had him.”
“He fell.”
Daniel said, “We're not going back.”
Ivy's face collapsed.
“Mama fixed him.”
“Ivy—”
“She put the safe thing in him!”
Everything stopped.
Gideon stared at her.
“What safe thing?”
“I don't know. The little black thing.”
“A drive?”
“I don't know.”
“How big?”
She held her thumb and finger half an inch apart.
Daniel muttered something Gideon chose not to repeat around a child.
“When did she tell you?”
“She said if people came, hold Albert tight.”
Gideon looked toward the tunnel.
Gunmen inside the house.
Evidence inside a stuffed rabbit.
A hospital employee who may already be compromised.
He had exactly the kind of decision he had spent three years avoiding.
The kind where caring about someone meant you could lose them.
Daniel read his face.
“No.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You don't have to.”
“The rabbit may tell us why they're doing this.”
“And going back may get you killed.”
“Then I'll be efficient.”
“Gideon.”
“Ivy stays with you.”
Daniel stepped closer.
“You are not twenty-eight anymore.”
“I'm forty-three.”
“You've become more irritating with age.”
“Stay with the girl.”
Daniel's jaw tightened.
Then a sound came from the passage.
Metal scraping.
Both men turned.
Someone was opening the library end.
They had found the door.
Daniel shoved Gideon toward the driver's seat.
“New plan.”
He slammed the carriage-house switch.
The exterior doors opened.
Snow blew inside.
“Drive.”
They pulled out just as two figures appeared in the hidden passage behind them.
Shots hit the rear quarter panel.
Ivy ducked.
Gideon accelerated through the trees.
The old estate road curved toward the southern wall.
“Not the gate,” Daniel said.
“I know.”
The Range Rover struck a snowbank, fishtailed, recovered.
A second set of headlights appeared behind them.
“They've got a vehicle.”
“How?”
“They brought three.”
Gideon almost admired the planning.
Almost.
Ivy crouched low.
“Gideon?”
“Yes?”
“Are they bad people?”
“Yes.”
“Are you?”
That question actually made Daniel turn around.
Gideon kept his eyes on the road.
“I've done bad things.”
“Like what?”
“Complicated things.”
“That's what grown-ups say when it's bad.”
Daniel made a noise that might have been a laugh.
Gideon glanced in the mirror.
“I've hurt people who tried to hurt others.”
Ivy considered that.
“Mama says hurting people makes more hurting.”
“Your mother sounds smarter than me.”
“She is.”
The pursuing SUV gained.
Daniel lowered his window.
Gideon looked at him.
“You're not shooting from my car.”
“It's currently my least important concern.”
He fired twice at the front tire.
The SUV swerved.
Hit a tree.
Snow exploded around it.
Gideon did not slow.
They crossed a frozen service road and emerged two miles south of the property.
Daniel called his most trusted off-site team.
Not estate security.
Not Vale corporate.
Men whose salaries he paid through an entity Gideon had forgotten existed.
“Meet at St. Anthony's,” Daniel said.
Gideon glanced at him.
“We're going to the hospital?”
“They attacked the house. Which means either they already have Leah or they're about to.”
Ivy heard.
“Mama.”
“We're getting her,” Gideon said.
Twenty-three minutes later, they reached St. Anthony's through the ambulance entrance.
Daniel's men met them downstairs.
Gideon expected resistance.
There was none.
That frightened him more.
The seventh-floor nurses' station looked normal.
Too normal.
Christmas garland.
A plastic snowman.
Two nurses charting.
Daniel showed identification.
“Leah Shaw.”
A nurse checked the computer.
“Room 714.”
“Security?”
“She had an officer.”
“Had?”
The nurse's expression changed.
“I think he's still—”
Daniel was already moving.
Room 714 stood open.
Empty bed.
IV tubing on the floor.
A blood-pressure cuff torn loose.
One chair overturned.
Gideon stepped inside.
The window was closed.
No sign of forced entry.
On the bed was a folded sheet of hospital paper.
Daniel reached for it.
Gideon stopped him.
“Gloves.”
Daniel pulled on a pair.
Unfolded the note.
Four words had been printed with a black marker.
YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT HER.
Ivy appeared behind them.
Gideon turned too late.
She saw the empty bed.
Saw the tubing.
Saw the note.
Her face went white.
“Mama?”
Gideon knelt.
“Ivy—”
She started crying.
Not loudly.
That was worse.
“We'll find her.”
“You said she was alive.”
“She is.”
“You don't know!”
“No,” Gideon said. “I don't.”
Her tears stopped because the truth surprised her.
“But these people made a mistake.”
“What?”
“They took your mother from a hospital with cameras, staff, elevators and doors.”
Daniel's phone was already in his hand.
Gideon stood.
“They wanted us frightened.”
He looked at the security camera above the doorway.
“They should have wanted us blind.”
Daniel pulled the hallway footage.
The recording jumped from 2:11 a.m. to 2:19.
Eight minutes missing.
But the elevator camera had not been erased.
At 2:14 a.m., two men in paramedic uniforms pushed a gurney inside.
Leah lay unconscious beneath a blanket.
A third person stepped into the elevator behind them.
Gray suit.
Gray tie.
Ivy grabbed Gideon's hand.
“That man.”
Gideon stared at the screen.
The face turned toward the camera for less than a second.
Gideon knew him.
Everyone on Wall Street knew him.
Everyone at Vale Holdings knew him.
Sebastian Rourke.
Gideon's oldest friend.
Juniper's godfather.
The man who had carried her coffin.
Ivy whispered, “That's the man Mama was scared of.”
May you like
Then Gideon's phone rang.
Sebastian Rourke's name appeared on the screen.
