Eighteen terrified nannies had already fled Dominic Vale’s fortified estate,

The north wing did not resemble the rest of Blackwood Manor.

Where the eastern and southern galleries were monuments to gilded wealth and polished dark timber, this corridor was a stripped, clinical concrete corridor. The original oak floors had been torn up, replaced by poured gray industrial cement that smelled of damp lime and disinfectant. There were no paintings, no rugs, no chandeliers—only raw fluorescent strip lights mounted at fifty-foot intervals, currently dark under the midnight power conservation mode.

I moved with the silent, creeping balance of someone who had spent her childhood slipping through hospital wards after hours.

Every step sent a sharp jolt of pain through my cracked ribs, but the adrenaline surging through my veins drowned the ache in cold fire. In my right hand, I held the heavy brass flashlight I had taken from the nursery emergency kit, keeping the beam directed strictly at the floor to avoid alerting the security cameras mounted in the corners of the ceiling.

The humming grew louder as I approached the third door on the left.

It was a melodic, broken sound—the voice of a singer whose vocal cords had been scarred by smoke or screaming, rising and falling in erratic, mournful cadences:

"...and the wild birds sing in the morning light, but the cold sea took my darlin'..."

The door was heavy reinforced steel, painted industrial gray, fitted with a sliding meal hatch at knee level and a narrow vision slit of bulletproof glass reinforced with embedded wire mesh. Above the handle, a digital keypad glowed amber.

I stepped to the vision slit and peered inside.

The room was illuminated by a single low-wattage heat lamp mounted in the ceiling. It was furnished with a low platform bed, a stainless steel toilet, and a small wooden desk. The walls were covered entirely in acoustic foam padding, damp and peeling at the corners from the pervasive lake humidity.

Sitting on the edge of the mattress, wrapped in an oversized gray wool hospital robe, was a woman.

She couldn't have been more than thirty, but her frame was skeletal, her long black hair matted with sweat, falling in tangled cords over her shoulders. Her face—illuminated by the pale amber glare of the heat lamp—took the breath from my lungs.

She was not Julianna Vale.

She was Julianna's twin sister.

The same high cheekbones, the same sharp, aristocratic nose, and the same terrifying, mercury-gray eyes that Dominic and Noah carried. But across her throat, tracing from ear to ear, was a jagged, raised purple surgical scar—the mark of a tracheotomy that had been hastily performed and poorly healed.

I raised my knuckles and tapped twice against the glass.

Tap. Tap.

The humming stopped instantly.

The woman’s head snapped toward the door. Her gray eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated terror. She scrambled backward on the mattress, her thin back hitting the acoustic foam, her hands coming up in front of her face as if bracing for an electric shock or a syringe.

"Kalliope," I whispered through the speaking grate beneath the glass. "Kalliope, I am not here to hurt you. Noah sent me."

The woman froze.

Her hands slowly lowered, revealing eyes that were drowning in desperate, disbelieving madness. Her lips moved, dry and chapped, but no sound came out for three long seconds.

Then, she crawled toward the door, her knees scraping against the cold cement, until her face was pressed against the glass, separated from mine by three inches of reinforced polycarbonate.

"Noah...?" her voice was a wet, ragged hiss through the speaking grate. "My... my baby? Is he alive?"

"He's asleep in the nursery," I whispered, tears burning the backs of my eyes. "He threw a bronze horse at me today. But then he held my hand and told me you were crying in the dark."

Kalliope pressed her trembling palm against the glass, her fingers spreading wide. Tears spilled over her sunken cheeks, cutting clean tracks through the gray grime on her skin.

"Dominic thinks... Dominic thinks I died in the harbor four years ago," she rasped, her breath fogging the small window. "The car bomb... it wasn't meant for Julianna. It was meant for him. But Julianna was driving. I was in the passenger seat."

"Who put you in this cell, Kalliope?" I asked, leaning in close. "Who locked you in here?"

Kalliope’s eyes darted frantically toward the end of the concrete corridor, her body beginning to shake with violent, spastic tremors.

"Marcus," she wheezed, her voice climbing into a frantic, terrified pitch. "Dominic's brother. The underboss. He pulled me from the burning wreck before the police arrived. He told Dominic that both sisters were vaporized in the explosion. He’s been keeping me down here for four years... harvesting my signature for the family offshore trusts."

She gripped the speaking grate with claw-like fingers, her face contorting in agony.

"The tea, girl! Did Dominic drink the tea tonight?!"

"No," I answered. "Noah warned me. I poured it down the drain."

Kalliope let out a choked, sobbing breath that sounded like a drowning gasp. "Marcus is convening the family council at noon tomorrow. If Dominic dies tonight, Marcus takes the sovereign seat and becomes Noah's legal guardian. And the moment Marcus signs the trust documents... he will put a bullet in the boy's head and throw his body into the lake."

A heavy, metallic CLACK echoed from the entrance of the north wing.

The double iron doors at the end of the corridor were opening.