Chapter 6

The guest room—Mara’s self-appointed bunker—had turned into a cage. The broken latch on the door, once quaint to her, now looked deliberate, as if the house itself had decided to keep her in. Through the narrow window she saw only the service alley and the estate walls beyond it, blank and high and final.

Her phone screen threw the countdown back at her: 06:08:21.

Six hours, eight minutes, twenty-one seconds until Lena’s disappearance became official. Until the law stopped listening. Until Victor walked into whatever he’d been waiting for.

Adrian Sloane’s email had arrived three hours and seventeen minutes earlier, a single hard sentence that severed her last legal path into the archive: Access to the Vale Family Archive has been revoked effective immediately.