Chapter 957
“We did,” Liam confirmed. He reached out, his hand hovering near her arm for a moment before dropping back to his side. “But Victor won’t stop. He’ll tear the city apart to get her back. She’s the only one who knows where the bodies are buried.”
“And where the money is,” Alistair added, walking over and wiping grease from his hands. “Martha Carter wasn’t just a hostage. She was the ledger.”
“Felix,” Skye called softly.
The young hacker stood by the cot, watching Victoria work, his expression unreadable. He turned at the sound of his name and looked at the floor.
“I just stole my father’s wife and drove the getaway car,” he said quietly. “There’s no going back now, is there?”
F𝗂𝘯𝘥 𝗻𝘰𝗏𝗲𝗅 P𝖣𝖥𝘴 𝗼𝘯 𝘨аl𝘯оv𝖾𝘭s.𝖼о𝘮
“No,” Liam said, his voice carrying a grim finality. “Welcome to the war, Felix.”
“The bill always comes due,” Skye murmured, remembering words Liam had spoken what felt like a lifetime ago. “We just paid the first installment.”
Martha Carter gasped — a sharp, choked sound. She sat bolt upright, eyes wide with terror.
“The baby!” she cried, her voice raw. “Where is the baby?”
Parker took her hands, trying to calm her. “Mom, there’s no baby. It’s just us.”
“No, no.” Martha shook her head frantically. “The blanket. The blue blanket with the serpent — she has to give it back. Dominic said she has to give it back.”
Skye exchanged a sharp look with Alistair.
“Dominic?” Alistair stepped closer, his brow furrowed. “Mrs. Carter, what does Dominic Thorne have to do with this?”
The morning light filtering through the reinforced blinds of the safe house was grey and unforgiving, doing nothing to warm the cold concrete room where Skye sat. An old photograph rested on the table before her.
Parker had found it in his mother’s pocket — a crumpled, faded picture of a younger Martha Carter sitting in a garden chair, holding a baby wrapped in a distinctive blue blanket.
“Look at the embroidery,” Skye said, pointing to a detail in the photograph. “A serpent entwined around a dagger. The Vance family crest.”
“Why was my mother holding a Vance baby?” Parker asked, rubbing his red-rimmed eyes. He hadn’t slept at all.
“Check the date,” Alistair said, his voice low.
“June 14, 1985,” Skye read aloud. That made the child roughly thirty-nine now. The timeline fit perfectly.
“The brother who was taken to the Blackwood Institute,” Alistair said, a shadow passing over his face. “Julian remembered them taking him. He remembered the screams.”
“If Ethan was born in ’85, he would have been nineteen during the assassination attempt twenty years ago,” Skye calculated. “Old enough to pull a trigger. Old enough to be broken by whatever they did to him.”
“If Martha was holding him…” Skye trailed off as a new thought surfaced. “Maybe she wasn’t just a bystander. Maybe she was trying to save him.”
“Or she was a nurse,” Liam said. “Victor Carter had deep ties to the Institute. If he forced his wife to care for the subjects…”
“That would explain why she was traumatized,” Felix said quietly, his gaze fixed on the photo. “She always talked about ‘the lost boy’ during her episodes.”
“We need answers,” Skye said, rising. “Is she lucid?”
.
.