Chapter 17 - THE LODGE
Charles was no longer trying to win.
He was trying to disappear.
State police reached the Maine lodge just before midnight.
The helicopter sat empty near the tree line.
Inside, the safe had been opened.
The bearer bonds were gone.
Judge Wexler was found unconscious in the kitchen with a head wound.
“He left me,” Wexler whispered. “He said I was a liability.”
Charles had taken a snowmobile toward an old logging road.
Adrian wanted to join the search.
Ortiz refused.
“This ends with police, not revenge.”
Adrian looked at the frozen woods.
“I don’t want revenge.”
“What do you want?”
“My daughters to stop looking at doors every time they hear footsteps.”
Search teams found Charles’s snowmobile abandoned near a river before dawn.
Tracks led toward a bridge.
Then vanished.
For six hours, everyone assumed he had fallen through the ice.
At 9:20 a.m., Adrian received a text from a number that should not have existed.
A photograph of Clara sleeping in her hospital bed.
Taken from inside the room.
Under it were three words:
YOU MISSED ONE.
Adrian called the hospital.
The nurse answered immediately.
Clara was safe.
Mia was safe.
Elise was safe.
So who had taken the photograph?
Marcus, still recovering, asked security to pull visitor logs.
One name appeared twice using forged credentials.
Sophie Mercer.
Victoria’s younger sister.
Adrian had met her only three times.
She lived in London.
Or so he had been told.
Ortiz searched recent immigration records.
Sophie had entered the United States three weeks before the wedding.
Then Adrian remembered someone from the ceremony.
May you like
A quiet woman in a black staff uniform standing near the ballroom doors.
The woman who had watched Clara enter and never looked surprised.
