PART 3
THE LABORATORY BENEATH THE ASHES
The message arrived at 6:17 p.m.
COME ALONE, SADIE. BRING THE KEY. OR YOUR SISTER DIES.
I stared at the screen while the machines beside my hospital bed continued their steady beeping, as though my life had not just split open again.
Wyatt stood beside me, his jaw clenched.
“You’re not going.”
“I have to.”
“No.” His voice cracked with fear. “You were nearly killed less than twenty-four hours ago.”
Detective Beckett took the phone from my hand and studied the message.
“This is a trap.”
“Of course it is,” I whispered. “But Melanie is still my sister.”
Wyatt looked at me as though I had lost my mind.
“She helped plan your attack.”
“Maybe.”
“She stood there while you bled.”
“I know.”
The words hurt more than the stitches.
Yet I could not forget the photograph. Melanie’s carefully arranged tears. Walter’s reflection in the window. The strange message about my grandfather’s will.
Something was wrong.
And until I understood what it was, none of us were safe.
The police formed a plan.
I would appear to arrive alone at the abandoned Davis warehouse, while Beckett’s team surrounded the property. Wyatt was ordered to remain at the hospital.
He ignored that order.
At 10:05 p.m., I stepped out of an unmarked car beneath cold rain, wearing a dark coat over my hospital clothes. Bandages covered the left side of my face.
The warehouse stood at the end of an empty industrial road, its upper structure blackened by the fire that had supposedly destroyed it twelve years earlier.
But beneath the ruins, a faint line of white light glowed from the ground.
I held the brass key tightly.
“Sadie,” Beckett’s voice whispered through the receiver hidden beneath my collar. “We are in position.”
I walked toward a rusted steel door buried behind a collapsed wall.
