The Night of the Wolves
The travel from Red Roof Inn motel room & Sebastian’s corporate SUV to The Grand Ballroom of the Whitmore Tower (Floor 40) consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The line went dead.
Sebastian held the phone to his ear for two full seconds, listening to the silence where Lyra’s voice should have been. Then he lowered the device and looked at the display. Call duration: eleven seconds. The number was hers. The voice was not.
“Sir.” Silas stood in the doorway of the study, a tablet in his hand, his posture already shifted into operational mode. “We have a problem.”
Sebastian turned the phone over in his palm. “They have Finn. And Lyra.”
“I know.”
“How?”
Silas stepped forward and extended the tablet. A live feed from a security camera showed the Whitmore Tower, all sixty-two floors of glass and steel cutting into the night sky. The gala banner hung across the grand entrance: THE WHITMORE FOUNDATION — TWENTY YEARS OF INFLUENCE.
“They haven’t made a demand yet,” Silas said.
“Yes, they have.” Sebastian set the phone down carefully, as if it might shatter. “They want the ledger.”
“The one you found in Holloway’s safe.”
“The same.” Sebastian crossed to the wall safe behind the painting of the Thames and spun the dial from memory. The door swung open. Inside lay a single object: a black leather-bound book, its pages warped from moisture and age, the ink bleeding in places where water had seeped through the floorboards of an abandoned warehouse in Rotherhithe. He had found it forty-eight hours ago, hidden beneath a false plank in the floor of a room that had once belonged to Lyra’s father. The pages contained a record of every illicit transaction the Whitmore family had orchestrated over the past decade. Bribes. Blackmail. Three deaths that had been ruled accidents.
It was the only leverage they had.
“It’s a trap,” Silas said.
“Of course it’s a trap.” Sebastian closed the safe and pressed his palm flat against the cool steel. “But I’m going anyway.”
“Then you’re going armed.”
“I’m going with a recording device in my cufflink and you on the rooftop across the street with a directional microphone. If I’m not out in forty minutes, you call the Met and tell them where to find the bodies.”
Silas studied him for a long moment. “And if they search you?”
“They won’t. Victor Whitmore doesn’t touch people. He has them touched.” Sebastian picked up a slim black box from the desk and slid it into his inside pocket. “Besides, I’m bringing him a gift.”
The box contained a hard drive. Identical in every way to the one that had been in the safe beside the ledger—same make, same model, same scuff marks on the casing. The difference was that this one was empty. Seeded with a single encrypted file that would take Whitmore’s IT team three days to crack, and when they did, they would find nothing but a photograph of a dead fish.
Sebastian had a sense of occasion.
—
The Whitmore Tower rose from the London skyline like a monument to the proposition that money could buy godhood. The grand ballroom occupied the entire fortieth floor, a cathedral of black marble and crystal chandeliers, the walls lined with floor-to-ceiling windows that turned the city into a living painting. Three hundred guests moved through the space in a choreographed ballet of wealth and influence, champagne flutes catching the light, laughter polished to a mirror shine.
Sebastian stepped out of the elevator and felt the weight of every eye in the room slide toward him.
He had expected that. The Blackwood name carried weight in certain circles, but not these circles. Here, he was an intruder. Worse: he was a Holloway sympathizer. The Holloways had been the Whitmores’ rivals for three generations, and the feud had ended the way such feuds always ended—with the weaker family crushed into dust. Lyra’s father had died bankrupt and broken. Her mother had followed six months later, the official cause listed as pneumonia, though everyone in the room knew what pneumonia looked like when it was helped along by despair.
Sebastian was the man who had married the last surviving Holloway. That made him either a fool or a threat.
Victor Whitmore made his choice clear.
“Mr. Blackwood.” The voice came from behind him, smooth as oil on water. Sebastian turned to find Victor emerging from the crowd, his son Dorian a half-step behind. Victor was seventy-one, lean and tall, with silver hair combed back from a face that had been handsome once and was now merely expensive. His eyes were the color of slate, and they held no warmth. “I wasn’t certain you’d come.”
“I wouldn’t miss it.” Sebastian allowed a faint smile. “The Whitmore Foundation does such wonderful work. Feeding the hungry. Housing the homeless. Laundering reputations.”
Victor’s smile didn’t waver, but something shifted in the air between them. Dorian took a half-step forward, his jaw working, but his father raised a single finger and the younger man froze.
“You have something for me,” Victor said.
“I have a hard drive.” Sebastian tapped his pocket. “Containing a complete copy of the ledger your men spent the last six months trying to find.”
“And in exchange?”
“Lyra and Finn. Safe. Unharmed. With a car waiting at the service entrance and a flight plan filed to a destination I haven’t yet decided.”
Victor considered this, his head tilting slightly, like a bird of prey sizing up a wounded rabbit. “You understand, of course, that I cannot simply let you walk out of here. The ledger implicates people who would prefer not to be implicated.”
“The hard drive is encrypted. If I don’t check in with my security chief within the hour, he sends the key to every major news outlet in the country. Along with a summary of the contents.”
“And you expect me to believe you haven’t already done that?”
“I expect you to believe that I’m a rational man.” Sebastian met Victor’s eyes and held them. “Releasing the contents of that ledger would destroy your family. It would also destroy Lyra’s family name. There are things in those pages that implicate her father as well. I’m not interested in trading one ruin for another. I want my wife and my son, and I want to disappear.”
Victor’s smile returned, but it had changed. There was something like admiration in it now, or at least acknowledgment. “You’re cleverer than I gave you credit for, Mr. Blackwood.”
“I’m cleverer than most people give me credit for.”
“Bring the hard drive to the balcony.” Victor gestured toward the far end of the ballroom, where a sweeping staircase curved upward to a mezzanine level lined with private alcoves. “We’ll make the exchange there. My son will escort you.”
Dorian stepped forward, his hand closing around Sebastian’s elbow with more force than necessary. “This way.”
Sebastian went, feeling the crowd part around them like water around a stone. He kept his eyes forward, but his attention was elsewhere—counting exits, cataloging faces, noting the positions of the security men who stood against the walls in their ill-fitting tuxedos. Silas would be in position by now, the directional mic aimed at the mezzanine, recording every word.
They reached the stairs and began to climb. The noise of the ballroom fell away, replaced by the muffled thump of bass from the speakers and the distant clink of glasses. At the top of the stairs, a hallway stretched to the left, lined with doors. Dorian steered him toward the third door on the right and pushed it open.
The room was a private dining alcove, furnished with a mahogany table and twelve chairs. The far wall was a window that looked out over the ballroom below. And in the center of the room, seated in a chair that had been positioned to face the window, was Lyra.
She was dressed in a gown of deep burgundy, her dark hair swept up, her face composed in an expression of cold hatred. She looked like a queen forced to attend her own execution. When she saw Sebastian, something flickered in her eyes—relief, fear, love—but she suppressed it before it could fully form.
Behind her, a glass door led to a narrow balcony. Finn stood there, pressed against the railing, his small shoulders rigid. A security guard flanked him, a man with the build of a rugby player and the face of someone who had never laughed at anything genuine.
“Sebastian.” Lyra’s voice was steady, but he could hear the cracks beneath it. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“Where else would I be?” He crossed to her, ignoring Dorian’s hand on his shoulder, and knelt beside her chair. Up close, he could see the redness at her wrists where the zip ties had been. “Are you hurt?”
“Only my pride.”
“Good. That I can fix.” He stood and turned to face Victor, who had entered the room silently and now stood beside the window, his hands clasped behind his back. “The hard drive. For my family.”
Victor extended his hand. Sebastian reached into his pocket, pulled out the slim black box, and tossed it underhand. Victor caught it with the ease of a man who had been catching things his entire life.
“Open it,” he said to Dorian.
Dorian produced a laptop from a briefcase and connected the hard drive. A terminal window opened, showing the encryption barrier. He typed a string of commands, waited, and then turned to his father. “It’s real. The encryption is Whitmore-standard. It’ll take three days to crack, maybe less.”
“Three days.” Victor turned the hard drive over in his hands, studying it like a jeweler examining a flawed diamond. “You know, Mr. Blackwood, I almost believed you. You played the part well. The rational man. The devoted husband. The clever negotiator.”
Sebastian’s blood went cold.
“But then I asked myself: if I were in his position, would I really bring the only leverage I had into a room full of wolves?” Victor’s smile widened, and it was no longer admiration. It was cruelty, pure and simple. “The answer is no. I would bring a decoy. And I would keep the real prize somewhere safe.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t.” Victor nodded to Dorian, who drew a pistol from beneath his jacket and aimed it at Lyra’s head. “Let me explain it to you. You’re going to call your security chief and tell him to bring the real hard drive to the rooftop helipad. If he tries anything clever, my men will shoot your wife in the back of the head and your son in the chest. And then I will spend the next three days cracking your little decoy, and when I find it empty, I will have you brought to me, and I will take you apart piece by piece until you tell me where the real one is.”
Sebastian’s mind raced. He had anticipated betrayal, but not this fast. Not this thorough. He had fifteen seconds to make a decision, and every option led to death.
That was when Lyra moved.
She had been sitting still, her hands in her lap, her expression frozen in that mask of cold hatred. But when Dorian’s attention flickered to the laptop screen for a fraction of a second, she exploded into motion. Not combat—she had no training, no instinct for violence—but desperation. She lunged forward, her chair scraping across the floor, and slammed her shoulder into Dorian’s gun arm.
The pistol fired.
The bullet punched through the window behind Sebastian, shattering the glass into a curtain of diamond fragments. The sound was deafening. Below, in the ballroom, someone screamed. And then everyone screamed.
The stampede began.
Sebastian didn’t think. He grabbed Lyra’s hand and pulled her toward the balcony, where Finn stood frozen, the security guard momentarily distracted by the chaos below. Sebastian drove his shoulder into the guard’s chest, sending him stumbling backward into the railing, and scooped Finn into his arms.
“Go!” Lyra was already moving, her gown hiked up to her thighs, her bare feet leaving bloody prints on the shattered glass. “The service elevator!”
They ran.
Behind them, Victor’s voice rose above the chaos, sharp and furious. “After them! Bring them to me!”
The service elevator was at the end of the hall. Sebastian jammed his thumb against the call button, praying, and the doors slid open. He shoved Lyra and Finn inside, hit the button for the ground floor, and the doors closed just as the first Whitmore security man rounded the corner.
The elevator began to descend.
Lyra’s breath came in ragged gasps. She was shaking, her hands pressed against her chest, her eyes wide and wild. Finn buried his face in Sebastian’s shoulder, his small body trembling.
“It’s okay,” Sebastian said, though it wasn’t. “We’re going to be okay.”
Lyra looked up at him, and her expression changed. It wasn’t fear. It was something worse. It was knowledge.
“I didn’t just find the money,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I found the files on the Senator. Victor knows I have a second copy. He’ll burn the city down to find it.”
The elevator stopped.
The lights died.
In the chaos, Sebastian grabs Lyra and Finn and flees into a service elevator. Lyra gasps, “I didn’t just find the money. I found the files on the Senator. Victor knows I have a second copy. He’ll burn the city down to find it.” The elevator stops, and the lights die.