She Heard Her Grandson Screaming Behind the Nursery Door—Then She Saw His Father Sitting There Doing Nothing. But the moment Grandma noticed the tiny red light above the crib, she realized the camera had captured something far worse than anyone expected. / Chapter 26 / 50

Chapter 26 - Into the Lion’s Den

"They aren't coming to rescue us," Tommy said, his face hardening as he looked toward the flashes of red and blue light reflecting off the low-hanging mountain clouds. "They're coming to take Ethan down."

"We can't run from the state police," Ethan said, his voice trembling as Noah clung to him, shivering in the cold damp air. "If I run, it proves I'm guilty! If I just explain—"

"Explain what?!" Margaret cut in fiercely, grabbing Ethan’s jaw and forcing him to look at the approaching wall of flashing lights. "You think a squad of tactical officers with rifles drawn are going to hold a court hearing on the roadside? They have orders, Ethan! Sinclair owns half the state judicial committee. The second they put you in the back of a cruiser, you will have an 'accidental overdose' before you ever see a magistrate!"

"Margaret’s right," Tommy said, his jaw set grimly. "We don't go to the highway. We go into the deep woods. My brother has an off-grid cabin three miles past the ridge. No power, no cellular towers, pure dead zone."

"No," Margaret said.

Both men turned to look at her.

The rain was slowing to a fine mist, but the wind was getting colder, smelling of snow. Margaret stood on the edge of the shattered pier, her eyes blazing with an intensity neither Ethan nor Tommy had ever seen before.

"We don't hide like rats," she said. "If Arthur Sinclair wants a war over the sins of the past, we take the fight to his living room."

"Mom, Sinclair lives in an armed estate in the city," Ethan protested. "We don't have weapons, we don't have lawyers, we don't have anything!"

"We have the monitor," Margaret said.

She turned the phone around, showing them the screen. While Arthur had been gloating during the call, Tommy’s data mirror had continued to track the high-bandwidth packet transmission. A tiny green dot was pulsing over a topographical satellite map on the screen.

"Arthur didn't call from the city," Margaret pointed out, zooming in on the coordinate grid. "High-definition video streaming requires a direct microwave uplink in these mountains. Look at the ping distance. Less than four miles from here. He’s at the old Sinclair Hunting Lodge on the summit of Eagle Rock."

Tommy sucked in a breath. "Eagle Rock? That old timber fortress built by the copper barons? That place has three-foot-thick stone walls and iron gates."

"And it has my husband's private safe hidden in the study floor," Margaret said, her voice dropping into a deadly whisper. "The safe Arthur has been looking for since 1998. He thinks he won because he thinks the papers inside prove Ethan’s father stole the money. He doesn't know that safe doesn't hold ledger books."

"What does it hold, Mom?" Ethan asked, holding Noah tighter against his chest.

Margaret looked at her son, her eyes filled with twenty-five years of buried grief, secrets, and cold resolve.