Her Stepmother Chased Her Down the Hallway With a Wooden Candlestick—Until the 1-Year-Old Girl Fell Down the Stairs! Her Father Rushed In to Save Her, but What She Whispered About the Locked Room Left Him Frozen in Horror!

"Gone?" Arthur roared, the sound tearing from his throat before he caught himself, glancing back frantically at the hospital bed.

Leo’s eyes had snapped open. The boy was sitting up, trembling violently, his hands gripping the hospital sheet like a lifeline. Lily was stirring, beginning to let out a weak, frightened whine.

Arthur let go of Reyes’s coat, took two deep, shuddering breaths, and walked back to the bed. He pulled Leo against his chest, pressing his face into the boy's messy hair. "I'm here, Leo. It's okay. Daddy is right here."

"She's outside," Leo whispered.

It was the first sentence the seven-year-old had spoken in nearly twelve hours. The voice was brittle, like dry parchment ready to ignite.

Arthur looked down at his son. "No, buddy. She’s far away from here. We have guards outside the door. Nobody is getting near you."

"She doesn't need the door, Dad," Leo said, his eyes wide and vacant, staring directly at the air conditioning vent set into the hospital ceiling. "She lives inside the walls. She told me. She said when the house sleeps, she turns into smoke and crawls under the doors. If I make a sound, she takes Lily’s fingers one by one."

Arthur felt his soul fracturing into jagged shards. He hugged the boy tighter, his jaw clenched so hard his teeth felt ready to shatter. "She lied to you, Leo. She's a human being. She bleeds. And I swear to you on your mother’s grave, she will never, ever lay a hand on you again."

Arthur looked up at Reyes, who stood near the door, his hand resting instinctively on his holstered Glock.

"She had outside help," Arthur stated, his tactical mind cutting through the blinding haze of his rage. "A woman strapped to a gurney with a concussion doesn't drop two armed state marshals with neurotoxin darts in forty-five seconds during a synchronized power outage. Who is financing her, Reyes?"

"We don't know," Reyes answered frankly. "Claire Vane has spent twenty years moving through the upper echelons of wealth in New York, Chicago, and Boston. She has shell accounts in the Caymans, Liechtenstein, and Panama. If she has an extraction team on retainer, she could have funded them five years ago."

Arthur reached into his pocket and pulled out his encrypted smartphone. He dialed a ten-digit number from memory.

"Julian," Arthur said the moment the line connected. "Activate Protocol Zero. I want the Gulfstream fueled and on the tarmac at Teterboro within thirty minutes. Cancel the flight plans to Aspen or London. File a dummy manifest for the Bahamas."

"Where are we actually going, Mr. Vance?" his security chief, Julian Vance—no relation, but Arthur’s most trusted asset for fifteen years—replied over the line.

"Blackwood Point," Arthur said. "The Maine compound. The coastal lighthouse station."

"Sir, that facility hasn't been garrisoned in three years. It's off the grid."

"That's exactly why we’re going there," Arthur replied cold-bloodedly. "No fiber-optic lines. No municipal power grid. Reinforced concrete sea walls and a single land-bridge approach. If she wants to finish what she started, she’s going to have to come through the front door."

He hung up, sliding the phone into his pocket. He looked at Reyes. "You want to catch her, Detective? Or do you want to wait until your department finds another dead CEO and an orphan who drowned in a bathtub?"

"You're turning yourself into bait," Reyes said, stepping closer. "That's illegal, Arthur. Obstruction of justice, reckless endangerment of minors—"

"I am moving my children to a private, fortified sanctuary because the State of New York failed to keep a homicidal lunatic in handcuffs for more than three hours," Arthur fired back, his eyes boring into Reyes’s face. "You want to stop me? Arrest me right now. But if you don't have the cuffs in your hand, you either get in the car with us, or you watch from the sidelines."

Reyes stared at him for five long seconds. The veteran cop looked from the determined, murderous fire in Arthur’s eyes down to the terrified little boy huddled against the bed sheets.

Reyes reached behind his back, unclipped his gold detective shield, and dropped it onto the hospital bedside table alongside his departmental badge case.