An armed stranger kidnapped my wife, restrained me beside our bed, and revealed he had waited fourteen years for this moment—and then he turned toward her.

Meyers tossed my car keys onto the floor. They skittered across the pine planks, stopping at my feet.

“Take your SUV,” Meyers ordered. “Your phone stays on the dresser, on speaker. If the call drops, if I hear a siren, if you take longer than forty-five minutes, I don't just shoot her, John. I trigger the charge and walk out the storm cellar. She dies in fire. Understand?”

I looked at Natalie. Her eyes were burning with an intensity that terrified me more than the explosive.

“Go, John,” she said, her voice dropping into a register I recognized from her years in the field. It was her tactical voice—the one she used when entering a breach. “Bring Sterling. Clear the ledger.”

She wasn't telling me to obey Meyers. She was telling me she had a plan. Her left shoulder was slightly dropped; her hand had slipped down the seam of the mattress during the distraction with Greg. The tape behind the headboard had already been peeled back. She had the folding knife.

I couldn't betray it. Not with a twitch of my eye, not with a hitch in my breath.

“Forty minutes,” I said to Meyers, leaning down to pick up the keys with blood-slicked fingers. “Keep your finger on that switch, Sydney. Because if she isn't breathing when I get back, Sterling will be the least of your concerns.”

“Thirty-eight minutes now, Detective,” Meyers whispered, pulling a stopwatch from his pocket and clicking the crown.

I backed out of the bedroom, the heavy oak door swinging shut between us. I heard the lock click into place behind me.

I sprinted down the stairs, skipping steps, my stocking feet skidding across the hallway linoleum. The silence of the house felt deafening. I bolted into the kitchen, threw open the utility cabinet, and grabbed an extra pair of handcuffs from the tackle box, shoving them into my waistband. I didn’t have a gun—Meyers had taken my duty weapon from the lockbox—but in the tool rack by the back door hung a heavy, twelve-inch framing hammer. I slipped it into my belt beneath my jacket.

I burst through the garage door, hit the wall button, and threw myself into the driver’s seat of the SUV. The engine roared to life. As the garage door rattled upward, revealing the quiet suburban street, I felt the phantom weight of the remote detonator in Meyers’s hand pressing against the base of my skull.