Vanessa tore Mia’s princess dress in front of the whole school.

"Mia!" The scream ripped from the deepest, most primal corner of my soul. I lunged toward the intercom speaker on the wall, clawing at the metal grill as if I could tear Vanessa out of the wiring. "Where is she?! What have you done to my baby?!"

*"Calm down, Sarah,"* Vanessa’s voice purred through the speaker, crisp and dripping with sociopathic delight. *"She’s alive. For now. Check your phone. Daniel, you might want to look too. It’s quite a cinematic shot."*

Daniel pulled his phone from his pocket, his thumb flicking across the glass. I scrambled over to his side, looking over his broad shoulder.

A private livestream link popped up on the screen.

The image resolved into a dimly lit, industrial space with exposed corrugated steel walls and damp concrete flooring. In the center of the frame, tied to a heavy steel folding chair, was Mia.

Her wrists were bound behind her with thick yellow zip-ties. Her lip was split, bleeding a thin crimson trail down her chin, and her eyes were wide with sheer, unadulterated terror. Standing behind her, draped in a tailored black wool coat with her bleached blonde hair pulled into a severe ponytail, was Vanessa Sinclair.

She held a sleek, nickel-plated revolver, resting the tip of the cold barrel against the soft hollow of Mia’s throat.

*"Mom!"* Mia sobbed through the phone’s tiny speaker. The sound of her weeping broke something fundamental inside me. *"Mom, please! They killed Uncle Thomas's dogs! They just broke through the doors!"*

"Vanessa, listen to me!" Daniel yelled at the phone, his voice vibrating with a terrifying fury. "This is between you and me! Let the girl go! The federal indictment against your family hasn't been unsealed yet! If you touch her, you will spend the rest of your life in an ADX supermax facility!"

Vanessa laughed—a high, brittle sound that echoed through the empty high school corridors.

*"Indictments? Supermax? Oh, Daniel, you think the law applies to people who print the money? My mother is dead. My grandmother is dead. The Sinclair fortune is being frozen by your bureaucratic friends in Washington. I have nothing left to lose except my family's honor. And your dead friend Leo stole that twelve years ago."*

"Leo stole nothing from you!" I screamed at the screen. "Your uncle Julian gambled it away! We have the documents! The ledger is right here in Locker 412!"

*"I don't care about the ledger, Sarah,"* Vanessa hissed, leaning down until her lips brushed against Mia’s trembling ear. *"I care about the key. The physical master key to the Geneva safe deposit box. Julian had it made before he died. He hid the micro-drive containing the private cryptographic keys inside a hollow titanium pendant. He gave it to Leo."*

The pendant.

The silver necklace Leo had clasped around Mia’s neck on the night of her seventh birthday. The tiny silver locket shaped like an acorn. Mia had worn it every single day of her life.

"She has it on," I choked out, horror gripping my throat. "It's around her neck right now! Just take the damn necklace and let her walk away!"

*"Oh, I took the necklace, darling,"* Vanessa smiled coldly, lifting a silver chain dangling from her gloved left hand. She held up the acorn pendant, then crushed it beneath the heel of her designer riding boot with a sharp crunch.

Inside the smashed silver shell was nothing. Just empty space.

*"It's empty, Sarah,"* Vanessa whispered, her voice dropping into a deadly, murderous octave. *"Leo anticipated this. He didn't put the chip in the pendant. He put it somewhere only you would know. And you have exactly forty-five minutes to bring it to the abandoned water purification plant at Blackwood Gorge."*

"I don't know where it is!" I shrieked, tears splashing onto the phone screen. "I swear to God, Vanessa, I don't know!"

*"Then I suggest you think very hard, Mrs. Miller,"* Vanessa said, pulling the hammer back on the revolver with a heavy, mechanical *CLICK*. *"Because at twelve-thirty sharp, if you aren't standing at the catwalk with that drive... I'm going to paint this concrete wall with your daughter's brains."*