Chapter 19 - The Extraction and the Ultimatum
Dante didn't dial. He stared at the screen, his jaw clenching so hard a muscle twitched violently beneath his cheek.
"Dante?" Clara asked, rising slowly with my assistance, terror instantly returning to her eyes. "What is it? What happened to Sophia?"
Dante turned the phone toward us. It was a direct video transmission from the private security terminal inside Sophia’s nursery back at the Manhattan Citadel.
The heavy oak doors were splintered off their hinges. Dr. Mercer was lying motionless on the floor beside the bed, zip-tied and bleeding from a head wound.
And Sophia’s bed was completely empty. The pink quilt was thrown aside, and across the white wallpaper above the headboard, someone had scrawled a single sentence in fresh black paint:
**THE LEDGER WAS NEVER THE TARGET.**
"Leo," Dante whispered, the name tearing from his throat like shredded glass. "Leo took her."
The betrayal was total. Leo—the man who had stood at Dante’s right hand for thirty years, the man Dante had trusted to secure the fortress while we walked into the trap at Blackwood—had been Victor Croft’s true partner from the beginning. Arthur was merely the noisy distraction sent to draw Dante and me out of the house.
The phone in Dante's hand began to vibrate with an incoming voice call.
Dante tapped the speaker icon, his voice deadly, stripped of every ounce of human mercy. "Leo. If you lay a single finger on my daughter, I will tear you apart with my bare hands."
A low, calm chuckle came through the speaker. It wasn't Leo.
"Leo was well compensated for his retirement, Dante," the aristocratic voice of Victor Croft purred over the line. "Your daughter is currently resting comfortably in the backseat of my town car. She’s remarkably quiet. She still won't speak, you know. But she holds onto that little piece of stained cloth she carries everywhere."
My waitress apron. Sophia still had my apron.
"What do you want, Croft?" Dante growled, stepping toward the river as our extraction helicopter appeared through the mist over the Hudson. "You have the accounts. You have the city. Name the price."
May you like
"I don't want your money, Dante," Croft replied, his tone chillingly smooth. "And I don't want your territory. I want Sarah Vance. Bring her to the North River Pier at noon. Just Sarah. If anyone else approaches—if your men, or your snipers, or your helicopters come within five blocks—I will drop your daughter into the Hudson River inside a locked trunk."
The line went dead.
