Gabriel hesitated.
Then said the words that split her world again.
“Because your mother worked for him too.”
Elise shook her head.
“My mother is dead.”
“No,” Gabriel said softly. “She disappeared twenty years ago after trying to leave Voss’s organization.”
Adrian stared at him.
“Both her parents worked for Voss?”
“Yes. And Voss believes Elise knows where her mother went.”
“I don’t know anything,” Elise said.
“But he thinks you do.”
Then Voss’s voice came over the speakers, calm and terrible.
“Bring me Elise Harrow alive.”
They ran.
Down the emergency stairs.
Through smoke.
Past echoing gunfire.
Oliver clung to Elise and whispered, “Bad guys?”
Adrian brushed his curls back.
“Yes, buddy.”
“You’ll stop them?”
Adrian looked at his son.
“Yes.”
And Elise believed he would die trying.
Five floors below, they entered an underground maintenance tunnel. Pipes hissed steam. The walls sweated cold.
Gabriel led the way.
“There’s armored transport outside the west tunnel.”
“Arranged by whom?” Rowan asked.
Gabriel hesitated.
“Someone Victor trusted.”
Elise flinched at her father’s name.
“Victor wasn’t innocent,” Gabriel said quietly. “But near the end, he was trying to take Voss down.”
“That does not erase what he did,” Adrian said.
“No,” Gabriel replied. “It doesn’t.”
They pushed deeper into the tunnel.
Then Elise stopped.
A memory struck her so hard she almost fell.
A woman laughing.
Long dark hair.
A silver necklace shaped like a crescent moon.
A voice whispering, “If anything happens, find the lighthouse.”
Elise gasped.
Adrian caught her arm.
“What is it?”
“My mother,” she whispered. “I remembered something. A lighthouse.”
Gabriel’s face changed.
“How much do you remember?”
“I don’t know.”
“We need to get you out now.”
Rowan saw his fear.
“What aren’t you telling us?”
Gabriel looked back down the tunnel.
“Her mother wasn’t just hiding from Voss. She stole something from him before she disappeared.”
“What?” Elise asked.
“Nobody knows.”
“But Voss thinks Elise does,” Adrian said.
Gabriel nodded.
“He believes her mother hid it for her.”
Then a voice echoed from the darkness.
“Agent Stone.”
Everyone turned.
Three armed men stepped from the shadows.
Behind them came Damien Voss.
Calm.
Unhurried.
As if the whole ruined world belonged to him.
“Disappointing,” he said.
Gabriel raised his gun.
“So the undercover agent chooses a side,” Voss murmured.
“You were always too emotional for this work.”
Adrian stood before Elise and Oliver.
Voss noticed.
“You really do love her,” he said. His eyes shifted to the child. “And the boy.”
Elise felt sick.
“My mother,” she said. “She’s alive, isn’t she?”
Voss’s face revealed nothing.
“That depends.”
“What did you do to her?”
He reached into his coat.
Everyone tensed.
But he pulled out an old photograph.
Worn at the corners.
He held it toward Elise.
Her knees weakened.
In the photograph stood her mother.
Beside her was Elise as a little girl.
They were smiling in front of a white lighthouse by the sea.
Voss tilted the photo.
“You have been there before.”
Elise could barely breathe.
“No…”
“Yes,” Voss said.
Then he smiled.
“And now you are going to take me back there.”