MY SILENT DAUGHTER SPOKE TO A STRANGER IN A HOTEL SERVICE CORRIDOR—AND THE FIRST THING SHE SAID WAS SOMETHING I WAS NEVER MEANT TO HEAR

The rain started forty miles outside of Chicago, turning Interstate 94 into a dark, slick ribbon of grey asphalt flanked by naked trees.

I drove my dark blue Audi SUV with both hands clamped on the steering wheel at ten and two. Iris was asleep in the back seat, wrapped in a fleece blanket, her thumb hooked gently over the edge of her rabbit doll.

Every five miles, my eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror.

A silver Lincoln Navigator had been maintaining a distance of three hundred yards behind us since we crossed the Wisconsin state line. It didn't tailgate. It didn't try to pass. It simply hovered in the spray of my back tires like a shadow.

Declan was right.

I had checked the internal access logs for our corporate network before leaving the penthouse. Someone had used Marcus’s administrator credentials at 6:15 PM—twenty minutes after I abruptly cancelled my evening meetings—to run a location query on my company vehicle's built-in GPS.

I had disabled the GPS tracker, pulled my personal laptop from my bag, and left my corporate phone sitting on the marble island in my kitchen.

I was off the grid. But they were still following the old-fashioned way.

"Mom?"

Iris’s small voice drifted from the back seat. She was sitting up, rubbing her eyes with the back of her small fist.

"I'm here, baby," I said, keeping my tone light, suppressing the terror clawing at my throat. "We're going on a little road trip."

"To the place with the yellow key?" she asked.

I caught her gaze in the mirror. "Yes. How did you know about the key, Iris? Really?"

Iris leaned her chin against her hand, looking out at the rain-streaked window. "Grandpa had a box under his bed," she murmured softly. "When I was four... before he went to sleep forever... he took me into his room. He showed me the yellow ribbon. He told me if the men in dark coats ever came to the house, I had to tell you to take the key to Declan."

I nearly swerved off the road.

My father had died five years ago. Iris had been barely fifteen months old when he passed. How could she remember a conversation from when she was four?

Wait.

My father died in November 2021. Iris was born in 2020. She wasn't four when he died. She was barely eighteen months old.

Unless... she wasn't talking about my father.

"Iris," I said, my voice trembling. "Who was the grandpa who gave you the key?"

"The man with the quiet house in the woods," Iris said, her voice dropping into that strange, unnatural calm that had unnerved Marcus in the hotel corridor. "The one Daddy took me to see when you were in London for work."

My heart stopped beating.

Julian hadn't taken Iris to a nursery when I was on my quarterly European investor tours. He had taken her to see someone else. Someone he called "Grandpa."

Julian’s father—a man who was supposed to have died in a boating accident in 1999.