45

Louis’s POV

Waiting was its own form of torture. I had given her the knife and was standing still, waiting to see where she would plunge it. Into the distance between us, or into the heart of this shared space I could no longer call a home.

For three days, the house was a museum of suspended animation. Sierra moved through it quietly, always thinking, always weighing. She spent hours with Katie, watching her with an intensity that felt like memorization. She toured the Savarina flagship twice, as if saying goodbye. She said nothing to me. The silence was a bell jar, and under it, I was slowly suffocating.

I threw myself into the logistics of either outcome. If she stayed, I would restructure the west wing entirely, give her a fully separate apartment within the house—a literal wall to match the metaphorical one. If she left, I worked with Marcus to triple the security detail for European operations, vetted staff for the Paris apartment, and drafted the legal documents granting her autonomous control of the holdings. Each task felt like building my own coffin.

On the fourth morning, the crisis came. Not from my past, not from a business rival, but from the most predictable and therefore overlooked vulnerability: routine.

Katie’s school had a half-day. Her usual driver, Ben, was taking her for her weekly piano lesson at Mrs. Everly’s studio in a quiet, affluent neighborhood. It was a route taken a dozen times. Secure. Boring.

The alert came to my phone and Marcus’s simultaneously. A panic signal from the car’s onboard system, followed by immediate GPS freeze. Then, a live feed from a traffic camera Marcus had patched into the route lit up my monitor.

It showed the black SUV stopped at a red light. A van, nondescript and white, rear-ended it with a gentle tap. Ben, ever professional, would have gotten out to assess the minor damage. The protocol was to stay in the locked vehicle, but a fender-bender in broad daylight… it was a perfect, psychological tweak.

The camera angle showed the van’s side door sliding open as Ben approached. Two men in dark clothing moved faster than thought. One engaged Ben—a brief, brutal struggle. The other yanked open the SUV’s rear door. I saw a flash of Katie’s yellow dress, her small form shrinking back. Then the feed went black.

My world dissolved into a silent, white-hot void. Every calculation, every empire, every sin—it all vaporized. There was only the image of that open door.

“Track the van. Now. Every camera, every satellite. I want eyes in the air in ninety seconds,” I heard myself say to Marcus, my voice strangely calm, the eye of the hurricane. “Lock down the house. Get Sierra. Do not tell her over the intercom. Bring her here. Now.”

I was already moving, pulling up other feeds, accessing city traffic grids. The van had disappeared into a blind spot. They knew the route. They knew the protocols. This was professional. Not Vance—this was too crude for him. This was someone who wanted to cause maximum, immediate pain.

The door to my study burst open. Sierra stood there, Marcus behind her, his face grim. She took one look at my face, at the frozen, ominous image on the main screen, and the blood drained from hers.

“What’s happened?” Her voice was a thread.

“Katie’s car was intercepted. She’s been taken.” I delivered the words like blows, knowing there was no gentle way. “Ben is down. The vehicle is gone.”

For a second, she didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. Then, a sound escaped her—a raw, animal whimper that she choked back with a physical force that shook her entire body. Her hands flew to her mouth. Her eyes, wide with primal terror, locked on mine.

And in that moment, the wall shattered. Not out of love, but out of a shared, cataclysmic fear that burned away everything else.

“Who?” The word was a razor.

“Working on it.” My fingers flew across the keyboard, pulling up a different database. “Not Vance. This is a message. This is punishment.” My mind, cold and clear in its fury, connected the dots. The crude method. The desire to hurt. “Victor Hale.”

Sierra’s breath hitched. “He’s in exile. You ruined him.”

“He’s a cornered animal with nothing left to lose. He promised to use Katie if you talked. You didn’t. So he’s making good on the threat.” I pulled up the last known photo of Hale, his face gaunt and hate-filled. “This is his final move.”

“Get her back.” Sierra was beside me now, her body vibrating with frantic energy, her eyes on the screens as if she could will Katie’s face to appear. “Louis, you get her back right now. Whatever it takes. *Whatever it takes.*”

She was giving me permission. Releasing the monster for this one, sacred purpose. The look in her eyes was not horror at what I might do, but a fierce, desperate demand that I do it.

“Marcus,” I snapped. “Activate the Crowe protocol. Full trace. I want every piece of data on Hale’s known associates, his family, his offshore accounts for the last six months. And get me a secure line to the head of the FBI’s kidnapping unit. We’re not waiting for bureaucracy.”

I then turned to Sierra, taking her by the shoulders. She was trembling violently. “Listen to me. They took her for leverage. They will make contact. They want to hurt me. They will keep her safe until they do. She is a tool to them. Do you understand? She is alive, and she will stay alive until they call.”

I was giving her the only logic that could keep her standing. She nodded, a jerky, mechanical movement, her teeth clenched to stop them from chattering.

My phone buzzed. A blocked number. I put it on speaker, nodding at Marcus to trace it.

“Trevane.” A voice, digitally scrambled but dripping with venom. Victor Hale.

“Where is my daughter?”

“She’s having a little adventure. She’s fine. For now.” The mockery in the tone made Sierra gasp. “You took everything from me. My company, my reputation, my freedom. Now I take something from you. The one thing you actually care about.”

“Name your price,” I said, my voice flat. “You can have it all back. Every dollar. The charges dropped. Full reinstatement.”

A laugh, a dry, crackling sound. “It’s too late for money, Louis. You didn’t just beat me. You humiliated me. You made me a ghost. Now I get to be the nightmare. Here are my terms: You go on live television in one hour. You confess to everything. The Monaco cover-up. The bribes. The blackmail. The murder of that Italian woman’s sister. You ruin yourself. Completely. You destroy the Trevane name forever. Then, and only then, I’ll tell you where to find your little girl. You have sixty minutes. The clock starts now.”

The line went dead.

Sierra stared at the phone as if it were a venomous snake. “He doesn’t want her. He wants to watch you burn.”

“He wants both,” I corrected, my mind racing. “He’ll kill her anyway after I confess. He knows I’ll hunt him to the ends of the earth if he doesn’t.”

“So what do we do?” The ‘we’ was absolute, forged in this new, terrible fire.

“We give him a show,” I said, a plan crystallizing with icy clarity. “Marcus, get Adrienne. We’re going live in fifty minutes. Set it up in the courtyard. National feed. Sierra,” I turned to her. “You need to be with me. On camera. You are the grieving mother. You are my strength. We sell it.”

Understanding dawned in her tear-filled eyes. “A performance.”

“The performance of our lives.” I cupped her face, forcing her to focus on me. “We need to buy Crowe and the teams time. We need to keep Hale glued to his screen, thinking he’s won. Can you do this? Can you stand beside me and sell the end of our world?”

She swallowed, then her spine straightened. The terror was still there, but it was being mastered by a fiercer, more powerful force: a mother’s will. “For Katie, I can do anything.”

Forty minutes later, we stood in the manicured courtyard, lights blinding us. Adrienne had worked a miracle. We looked shattered. Sierra’s eyes were red-raw, her face pale. I had undone my tie, my hair was disheveled. We held hands, her grip was a vise of shared desperation.

The camera light went red.

I began to speak, my voice breaking with manufactured—and all too real—emotion. “My daughter, Katie Trevane, has been taken…” I delivered a masterpiece of defeat. I confessed to being a flawed man, burdened by past mistakes. I begged, not to the kidnapper, but to the public, for her safe return. I poured every ounce of genuine fear and love for my child into the performance. Sierra leaned into me, a silent pillar of shared anguish, a single tear tracing a perfect path down her cheek.

It was convincing. It was heart-wrenching. It was a lie.

As I spoke, my other phone, tucked in my pocket, vibrated in a specific pattern. Marcus. Crowe had a location. An abandoned water treatment facility on the edge of the city. Heat signatures showed three adults, one small child.

The broadcast ended. The second it cut, the performance dropped. Sierra’s face hardened into a mask of lethal focus.

“We have her,” I said.

“Then go,” she said, her voice guttural. “Bring our daughter home.”

I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t tell her to stay. This was no longer about protecting the vulnerable. The woman before me was a lioness, and she was part of the hunt now.

“With me,” I said, and she followed without a word.

We raced downstairs to the garage where a modified, armored vehicle waited, Marcus at the wheel. Sierra climbed in beside me. As we sped through the gates, lights and sirens clearing a path, she reached over and took my hand. Not for comfort. For pact.

Her touch was ice and fire. It was not forgiveness. It was not love.

It was Alan Liance. Absolute and total.

For Katie, we were one weapon again. And heaven help anyone who stood in our way.