The gunshot was followed by a scream.

Then another.

I dropped to the floor, clutching the brass key so tightly its teeth cut into my palm.

“Nobody move!” Daniel Cross shouted.

Emergency lights flickered on.

The library glowed red.

A security guard lay beside the doorway, clutching his wounded shoulder.

He was alive.

But the man who had whispered into my ear was gone.

Daniel drew his weapon and ordered the doors sealed.

Dr. Pierce stood beside Adrian’s bed, trembling.

Victor Hale was nowhere near the doorway.

He stood beside the medical equipment, staring at something beneath the bed.

“Who fired?” Daniel demanded.

Nobody answered.

The injured guard gasped.

“Someone came through the service entrance.”

Daniel turned toward me.

“Mara. What happened?”

I opened my hand.

The brass key lay against my palm.

Attached to it was a tiny metal tag.

B-17.

“I don’t know who gave me this,” I whispered. “But he said my mother didn’t die by accident.”

Victor’s face changed.

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“Give me that.”

He reached for the key.

I stepped backward.

“Why?”

“Because whatever is happening here is dangerous.”

Daniel moved between us.

“She keeps it.”

Victor stared at him.

For a moment, the two men looked less like allies than enemies who had been waiting years for an excuse to fight.

Then the emergency generator restored the lights.

Adrian’s condition had worsened.

His blood pressure was dangerously low.

The doctors resumed treatment while Daniel called for an independent surgical team and ordered the suspicious material preserved for testing.

Dr. Pierce protested.

Daniel ignored him.

And I finally understood something.

The black cord was only the beginning.

Someone had spent twelve days making sure Adrian got worse.

Someone had been watching the doctors.

And someone knew my mother.

Daniel took me into a small security office adjoining the library.

“Tell me everything about her.”

I hesitated.

“My mother was Evelyn Bennett. She repaired marine equipment near the harbor. She died three years ago in a warehouse fire.”

Daniel went still.

“What warehouse?”

“Pier Seventeen.”

His expression hardened.

“That’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because Adrian’s father owned Pier Seventeen.”

I stared at him.

Daniel opened a locked cabinet and removed an old photograph.

It showed four people standing outside a waterfront building.

A younger Victor Hale.

A man I recognized from portraits throughout the mansion: Adrian’s late father.

A third man wearing a physician’s white coat.

And my mother.

She was smiling.

My knees nearly gave way.

“Why was she with them?”

Daniel shook his head.

“I don’t know.”

But he wasn’t telling me everything.

I could see it.

“Daniel.”

He looked away.

“Three years ago, Adrian ordered an investigation into the Pier Seventeen fire. Someone destroyed the evidence before he could find out what happened.”

My heart pounded.

“Why would Adrian investigate my mother’s death?”

Daniel studied me.

“Because she saved his life once.”

I couldn’t speak.

“Adrian was twenty-nine when someone sabotaged a boat carrying him and his father. Your mother discovered a defect in the emergency restraints and warned the crew. Adrian survived.”

“And his father?”

Daniel lowered his eyes.

“He didn’t.”

I felt the room tilt.

My mother had never told me.

Not one word.

Daniel continued.

“Adrian spent years trying to find her afterward. By the time he located her workshop, the fire had already happened.”

I remembered the final months of my mother’s life.

The strange phone calls.

The unfamiliar cars outside our apartment.

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The way she had started sleeping with the hallway light on.

And the sentence she’d repeated whenever I asked what frightened her.

“Some knots are meant to hold things together, Mara. Others are meant to hide what’s broken.”

I suddenly understood.

The key.

B-17.

It wasn’t a room number.

It was a storage compartment.

My mother had rented a small locker at a harbor storage facility.

Unit B-17.

She had told me never to open it unless someone came asking about the black rope.

At the time, I’d thought she was being paranoid.

Now I knew better.

“Daniel, I know where this key belongs.”

He stood.

“Then we’re going.”

But before we reached the door, his phone rang.

He listened for several seconds.

Then his face drained of color.

“What do you mean the surgeon is gone?”

A pause.

“How did he get past security?”

Another pause.

Daniel slowly lowered the phone.

“Malcolm Pierce disappeared from the medical wing.”

I stared at him.

“Where’s Adrian?”

Daniel didn’t answer immediately.

Then he said something that made the entire world feel unreal.

“Someone has disconnected the cameras around his bed.”

We ran.

By the time we reached the library, the medical staff were shouting.

The monitors were flashing.

Adrian’s bed was empty.

And on his pillow lay a folded piece of paper.

Daniel opened it.

There were only seven words.

BRING MARA BENNETT TO PIER SEVENTEEN.

Then, beneath the message, someone had written a time.

4:00 A.M.

We had thirty-one minutes.

And the man who had taken Adrian knew exactly who I was.

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