I closed my eyes, a tear of profound, overwhelming relief slipping down my cheek. “Thank you.”

“Stay awake, my beautiful girl,” Victoria whispered, her voice finally cracking with a sliver of fierce, terrifying emotion. “I am coming. And may God have mercy on the man who did this to you, because I will not.”

The phone slipped from my sweaty, trembling hand. It clattered against the floorboards. The edges of the yellow nursery faded entirely into a peaceful, suffocating darkness.

As the heavy, synchronized, urgent boots of emergency paramedics shattered the quiet of my house—kicking open the front door and rushing into the nursery to lift my unconscious, hemorrhaging body onto a trauma stretcher—Victoria Sterling was already sitting in the back of her chauffeured Maybach, speeding toward the private airport in Chicago.

She wasn’t crying. She was tapping rapidly on her encrypted corporate tablet, initiating a massive, silent, and catastrophic financial freeze that would permanently stop Mark’s heart long before the police ever put him in handcuffs.

Chapter 3: The Federal Guillotine

It was 11:00 p.m.