SHE PUSHED HER 2-YEAR-OLD STEPDAUGHTER OFF A THIRD-FLOOR BALCONY—BUT NEVER EXPECTED THE FATHER TO CATCH HER! As shattered glass covered the marble floor, he looked up and discovered something that would destroy his wife's darkest secret forever...

"STOP!" Daniel's scream ripped through the roar of the helicopter turbine and the crashing thunder.

He stood twenty paces away, the Glock raised with both hands, the rain streaming into his eyes. His clothes were soaked through, his knuckles white against the grip.

Vanessa turned around slowly. Her face was twisted into a triumphant, demonic sneer. Nora was limp in her arms, her head lolling against Vanessa's shoulder, barely conscious, her skin pale blue from the thallium derivative flowing through her tiny veins.

"You're too late, Danny!" Vanessa shrieked over the deafening whine of the jet turbine. "The pilot is on Julian’s payroll! We have clearance to Nova Scotia, and from there, a private freighter to a country with no extradition treaty!"

"Put her down, Vanessa!" Daniel stepped forward, his boots sloshing through the pooling water on the tarmac. "The hospital has Nora's antidote! If you take her into the air, she dies within twenty minutes! You won't get a single cent of the trust fund if she's dead!"

"I don't care about the money anymore!" Vanessa laughed hysterically, her eyes wide with unhinged madness as she backed toward the unprotected edge of the rooftop—a drop of forty-two stories down into the churning, black waters of the East River. "Julian promised me freedom, but I realized something in that psychiatric cage, Daniel. Freedom is boring. Revenge... revenge is divine!"

Vanessa shifted Nora’s limp body with one arm, holding the child directly out over the forty-two-story abyss.

"VANESSA, NO!" Daniel dropped to his knees, lowering the gun to the wet concrete, holding his hands out in desperate, pleading supplication. "Kill me! Take my life! Throw me over the edge! Just give me my daughter!"

"She's not your daughter, Daniel," Vanessa sneered, her voice dripping with venomous pleasure. "She's your sister's bastard. She's a curse on this earth. And curses belong in the dark!"

Nora’s eyelids fluttered open weakly. She looked through the blinding rain, her tiny hand reaching out toward Daniel.

*"D... Daddy..."*

Vanessa’s fingers loosened.

Daniel didn't think. He didn't calculate the physics, the distance, or the impossibility of the leap. With every remaining ounce of strength in his broken, battered body, Daniel launched himself across the slick, rain-drenched rooftop like a missile.

Vanessa let go.

Nora fell into the black void.

Daniel threw his body over the ledge, his left hand catching the cold steel mesh of the safety netting beneath the rim, his right arm shooting out into the empty, howling darkness.

His fingers caught Nora's wrist.

The violent jolt nearly tore Daniel's shoulder from its socket. Nora swung helplessly forty-two stories above the churning black river, screaming in sheer, blind terror as the freezing rain lashed her face.

"I HAVE YOU!" Daniel roared against the storm, blood vessel bursting in his right eye from the immense strain. "NORA, LOOK AT ME! I HAVE YOU!"

Above him on the rooftop, Vanessa looked down over the ledge, pulling a heavy steel emergency crowbar from the helicopter landing kit, a cold, triumphant smile spreading across her lips.

"Catching her once was luck, Daniel," Vanessa whispered, raising the heavy crowbar with both hands directly above his gripping fingers. "Catching her twice is a tragedy."

She swung the iron bar down with all her might.

*BANG.*

A gunshot echoed through the thunder.

Vanessa’s eyes went wide. A dark crimson circle bloomed in the center of her forehead. The crowbar slipped from her lifeless fingers, tumbling into the abyss. Her body tilted forward, plunging past Daniel into the black void of the East River below.

Daniel looked up through the blinding rain, his arm screaming in agony as he held Nora suspended over death.

Standing at the edge of the roof, holding a smoking pistol, was not an FBI agent. It was not Mia.

It was Clara.