The penthouse door handle turned a second time.
Emily snatched Lily from my arms and backed toward the bedroom.
Her face lost what little color the cold had left in it.
“That’s one of them,” she whispered.
“At the estate, they never knocked.”
I pressed one finger to my lips and pointed toward the bedroom.
She moved silently, carrying our sleeping daughter against her chest.
Before closing the door, she looked at me with the same terrified eyes I remembered from the morning she disappeared.
I slid the secure phone into my pocket, closed the briefcase, and stood beside the entrance.
The deadbolt held.
Metal scraped against metal as the person outside tried a master key that could open the hotel lock but not the private bolt I had installed after Emily’s death.
Then came three controlled knocks.
“Mr.
Kincaid?”
I recognized the voice.
The man worked on my mother’s private security detail.
He had been standing near the revolving doors when Emily approached me.
I opened the door only as far as the security chain allowed.
“What are you doing here?”
He wore a dark coat with rain beading across the shoulders.
His expression was respectful, but his gaze moved past me, searching the room.
“Mrs.
Kincaid sent me.
The board is waiting.”
“My mother has my phone number.”
“She was concerned.”
“She sent you upstairs with a master key because she was concerned?”
For one second, his practiced expression slipped.
“Hotel security let me through.”
“No, they didn’t.
This floor is private.”
His eyes dropped to the damp footprints on the carpet behind me.
Emily’s footprints.
He had seen them.
I stepped into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind me before he could look farther inside.
“Tell my mother I’ll be downstairs in twenty minutes.”
“I can wait.”
“That wasn’t a request.”
He stared at me, weighing whether the grieving son he had watched for two years was capable of defying Victoria.
I let him see the answer.
At last, he walked toward the elevator.
I remained in the hallway until the doors closed around him.
Then I called hotel security from the wall phone and revoked every master key assigned to my floor.
I ordered two guards to the private elevator and told them no one entered without my approval.
When I returned to the suite, Emily was crouched behind the bed with Lily held tightly against her.
“He saw me outside,” she said.
“He saw a woman asking for work.”
“Victoria trained them to notice everything.”
“So did I.”
The secure phone vibrated.
The federal investigator’s message was brief: the Boston team had secured a warrant based on Emily’s confirmed identity, the payment records we had already uncovered, and the location attached to the key tag.
Agents were approaching the estate.
Another team was on its way to the hotel.
For the first time since seeing Emily beneath the awning, I allowed myself one full breath.
“They’re moving,” I told her.
She did not look relieved.
