Chapter 15 : The Decoy

"Tell me what you are walking into."

All three of them turned at once.

Three weapons dropped to their sides in the same motion, angled down and away, and I watched them perform the fastest controlled stand-down I had seen yet. Lucian stepped in front of the island. Not to block my view. The blueprints were already visible. He just moved toward me the way he always did, putting himself between my body and whatever the threat was, even when the threat was information.

"You should be in bed," he said.

"Tell me," I said. "All of it."

A pause. The three of them exchanged the look.

Then Lucian told me.

Webb had been at the fire. Not as a witness. Webb's family had owned the property adjacent to ours and the fire had not been accidental, something investigators had quietly buried when the insurance company involved turned out to share a board member with Webb's first holding company. Eli had not died. He had been pulled from the wreckage by Webb's private security team, taken off the record, and raised inside Webb's network.

Twenty years of training. Twenty years of shaping a grieving, displaced sixteen-year-old boy into something precise and weaponized.

Aimed at the Morgan family.

Aimed, eventually, at me.

"He does not know he is being used," I said.

"He does not care," Gavin said. "It does not change what he is now."

I looked at the blueprints. At the magazines lined up with geometric precision. At three men who had bought a franchise overnight and were now planning something considerably more permanent.

I did not try to stop them.

"Come back," I said.

Gavin reached me first. He put both hands on the sides of my face and looked at me for a long moment, memorizing something.

"Before sunrise," he said.

Zane pressed a small device into my palm. Flat, black, a single button centered on its face. "Direct line to my secondary phone. Press it once and I will know." He closed my fingers around it. "Once, Malia. I will feel it."

Lucian was last.

He cupped the back of my head and kissed me. Not performance. Not possession. Something truer than both of those things, and when he pulled back his voice had the same stripped quality it had carried earlier in the dark.

"Safe room. Lock it from the inside. Open it for us and no one else." He held my face. "No one else."

Then they were gone.

The penthouse door sealed behind them with a sound like a vault closing.

I stood in the kitchen for a full minute without moving. The blueprints were still spread across the island. I rolled them up so I did not have to look at them, turned off the overhead light, and walked to the safe room at the back of the master suite.

I locked the door.

I sat on the floor with my back against the reinforced steel and Zane's panic button held between both palms.

The backup tablet he had left me showed the building's exterior cameras. Feed running, timestamp ticking, everything normal.

I watched the clock on the wall go from two to three to nearly four in the morning.

The tablet screen went black.

Not sleep mode. Not a notification. One moment the feed was running and the next it was a dead rectangle of dark glass.

The lights flickered.

Once. Twice.

Then the penthouse went completely dark.

The intercom on the safe room wall crackled.

I pressed my back harder against the door. My hand found my stomach in the dark.

"مالي." جاء صوت إيلي عبر مكبر الصوت كما لو كان في الغرفة المجاورة. هادئ. دافيء. مدمرة بطريقة بدت حقيقية. "ذهبوا إلى كورال جابلز. لقد ظل منزل ويب فارغًا لمدة ثلاثة أيام. "لقد حركته بنفسي." وقفة. "لقد وقعوا في الفخ. كل واحد منهم."

ضغطت على زر الذعر مرة واحدة. مرتين. المرة الثالثة.

قال: "لن أؤذيك". "سأحضرك إلى مكان آمن، بعيدًا عن الرجال الذين اشتروا حياتك مثل الممتلكات وأطلقوا عليها اسم الحب."

حلقي مغلق.

"لقد كنت أراقبك منذ أوهايو"، قال. "منذ ما قبل ديريك. منذ قبل أي من هذا. لم أتوقف أبدا."

من مكان ما في البنتهاوس المظلم، بعيدًا في ممر الدخول ولكن لا لبس فيه على الإطلاق، جاء صوت أفرغ رئتي تمامًا.

الجرس الإلكتروني الناعم للمصعد الخاص الذي يصل إلى الطابق الثاني والستين.

"أنا قادم الآن، أختي الصغيرة"، قال إيلي. "حان وقت العودة إلى المنزل."