Chapter 30 - THE COUNTDOWN AT THE HIGH-RISE VAULT
Forty-eight hours later.
The penthouse suite of the Vance Tower in midtown Manhattan sat seventy stories above the glittering grid of New York City. Below, the yellow cabs crawled like ants beneath the neon hum of Times Square. Outside the floor-to-ceiling panoramic windows, the sky was bruised purple with an impending snowstorm.
Ethan stood by the glass, holding a secure satellite phone to his ear.
Behind him, Lily was sitting on a massive velvet couch, coloring a picture of a white cottage surrounded by mountains. She was wearing a new yellow dress, her laughter occasionally echoing through the vast, quiet penthouse as her puppy chased a rubber ball across the polished marble.
“Everything is in place, Mr. Vance,” his chief of private security whispered over the encrypted line. “The Gulfstream is fueled at Teterboro. The flight plan is filed for an unmonitored airfield in New Zealand under an assumed diplomatic registry. No Vance name. No Sterling records. You disappear tonight.”
“Good,” Ethan said. “Have the transport ready at the private hangar by midnight.”
He ended the call and slipped the phone into his pocket.
He walked over to Lily, kneeling beside the low coffee table. He watched her carefully color the roof of the cottage with a red crayon.
“Daddy?” she asked, looking up at him with those deep, expressive eyes. “Are we going to live in the mountains now?”
“Yes, sweetheart,” Ethan smiled, brushing a strand of hair from her forehead. “Where there are no locked doors. Where nobody can ever touch you.”
Suddenly, the lights in the penthouse flickered.
Once. Twice.
Then the seventy-story tower plunged into absolute, suffocating blackness.
The mechanical hum of the central elevators groaned to an abrupt halt. The biometric locks on the penthouse heavy steel entry doors clicked unlocked as the power grid was cleanly, surgically severed from the city’s main trunk line.
Ethan moved instantly. He scooped Lily into his left arm, drawing his suppressed Glock with his right, retreating toward the fortified panic suite located behind the penthouse master library.
*DING.*
The elevator chime rang out in the pitch black.
It wasn't possible. The power was dead. The cables were supposed to be locked on emergency brakes.
Through the glass doors of the private elevator lobby, a soft red emergency light flickered to life.
The steel doors slid open smoothly.
Standing inside the elevator was a woman in an elegant, cream-colored wool coat, holding a silver briefcase in one hand and an antique iron key in the other—the exact replica of the key that had unlocked Lily’s collar four months ago.
Her face stepped into the red emergency light.
It wasn't Elena. It wasn't Vanessa.
It was a face Ethan had seen only once before—in an oil painting hanging in the private gallery of the Sterling estate in London. A woman who was supposed to have died fifty years ago on a burning yacht off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.
She looked at Ethan, then her gaze shifted to Lily with a terrifying, tender smile.
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“Hello, Ethan,” the old woman whispered, her voice echoing through the pitch-black penthouse. “Thank you for keeping my great-granddaughter alive. Now... give the family back what belongs to us.”
From the floor below, the sound of six synchronized breaching charges clicked onto the reinforced walls of the penthouse.
