My sister called me at midnight and whispered, “Turn off every light. Go to the attic. Don’t tell your husband.” I thought she was losing her mind — until I looked through the floorboards....

The steel gantry stairs of Crane 42 shook violently under the howling harbor wind. Two hundred feet below, the black, oily waters of the Baltimore harbor churned against the concrete pylons.

I climbed the wet iron steps, step by step, the icy wind tearing at my jacket.

Mara was twenty feet behind me, her handgun drawn, her eyes scanning the shadows of the upper steel framework.

In my right hand, I held my phone. The screen was lit up, connected to an active voice call.

Fifty feet above us, standing on the open metal platform beneath the giant yellow arm of the crane, was Julian Vane.

He had set his black pelican case onto a maintenance workbench. A heavy rugged laptop was open, its blue light illuminating his cold, rain-streaked face. A thick fiber-optic cable ran from his laptop directly into the crane's central junction box.

His phone, resting on the steel workbench beside his computer, was vibrating on speakerphone.

My voice echoed through his speaker, ringing out over the sound of the wind and rain:

"Julian."

Caleb froze.

He slowly pulled his hands away from the keyboard, looking down through the open steel grating of the floorboards beneath his feet.

He saw me.

Standing on the catwalk fifty feet below him, bathed in the yellow glare of the dockyard floodlights, holding my phone to my ear.

"Elise," his voice came through my phone receiver, flat and hollow. "You really don't know when to give up, do you?"

"I gave up five years ago when I let a ghost into my home, Julian," I called out, my voice rising above the gale-force wind. "I'm not here to give up. I'm here to finish this."

Caleb let out a dry, bitter laugh, shaking his head as he wiped rain from his eyes. "You can't finish anything, Elise. Look where you are. You're standing on a rusted crane in the middle of a storm. In twenty seconds, the final packet uploads. I win."

"Look at your server diagnostic screen, Julian," I said calmly.

Caleb frowned. He glanced down at the glowing laptop monitor.

His smile vanished.

Red error text was flashing across his screen in rapid succession:

[CRITICAL ERROR: DUAL KEY MISMATCH]

[SOURCE CODE CORRUPTED]

[TRANSMISSION TERMINATED]

"What... what did you do?!" Caleb roared, leaning over the workstation, his fingers typing furiously against the keys. "I entered the override sequence from your father's journal! I had Noah's genetic key!"

"My father knew someone would eventually buy that journal, Julian," I said, taking three steps up the final gantry ladder, reaching the edge of his platform. "He was a brilliant cryptographer. Do you really think he would leave the real override code written inside a diary he took to public conferences?"

Caleb stared at me, his eyes wide with sudden, terrifying realization.

"The journal was a decoy," I revealed, stepping onto the open platform, wind whipping my dark hair across my face. "The real twelve-digit override code wasn't written on paper, Julian. It was the serial number stamped onto the back of my mother's wedding ring—the ring I've worn around my neck every day of my life."

I reached inside my sweater and pulled out a delicate silver chain. Hanging from the chain was a simple platinum band, its inner surface worn smooth by decades of wear.

Caleb looked at the ring, then looked at me. His face contorted into a mask of pure, unadulterated fury.

"Give me the ring," he snarled, drawing his suppressed pistol from his waistband and taking two heavy steps toward me.

"Drop the weapon, Vane!" Mara’s voice barked from the top of the ladder.

Mara stepped onto the platform, her Glock aimed squarely at the center of Caleb’s chest.

Caleb didn't look at Mara. His eyes remained fixed on me—on the platinum ring hanging between my fingers.

"Five years, Elise," Caleb whispered, his voice cracking with sudden, unhinged emotion. "Five years I lived in that house. I took care of you. I cooked your dinners. I rocked our boy to sleep when he had a fever. Do you really think I felt nothing?!"

"You felt whatever a predator feels when he feeds his bait, Julian," I answered, my voice steady as stone. "You never loved us. You loved the vault."

I stepped back toward the edge of the crane platform—toward the two-hundred-foot drop into the churning black ocean below.

I unhooked the silver chain from my neck.

"Elise, no!" Caleb gasped, reaching out his hand.

I held the ring over the open abyss.

"If I drop this ring into the harbor, Julian," I said softly, meeting his desperate, bloodshot eyes, "your forty million dollars vanishes forever. Your syndicate will hunt you to the ends of the earth for failing them. You will have nothing."

"Elise... please..." Caleb begged, his arrogant posture completely crumbling into a pathetic, desperate plea. "Don't do it... we can negotiate... I'll give you everything... just give me the code!"

"I don't need your money, Julian," I said. "I already have everything that matters."

I opened my hand.

The silver chain and the platinum ring slipped from my fingers, disappearing into the dark, rain-filled void beneath the crane.

"NO!" Caleb screamed.

In a fit of mad, suicidal desperation, Caleb hurled himself over the safety railing of the platform, reaching out into the empty air toward the falling ring.

His hands caught nothing but fog and rain.