SSophia closed the front door.
She stood in the hallway with Aurora’s rabbit in her hand and Seraphina’s note and looked at the wall in front of her and gave herself exactly thirty seconds.
Thirty seconds to feel it.
The fear. The fury.
The thing she had been holding back since Marcus’s voice on the phone forty minutes ago, the thing she had been building walls against with every steady word, every controlled breath and every deliberate act of composure since she had walked through that front door.
She felt it for thirty seconds.
Then she put it away.
She turned around.
Marcus was in the hallway behind her. Detective Reeves beside him.
Elena in the kitchen doorway. Three people looking at her.
She held up the note.
“Bag this,” she said to Reeves. “Carefully. Her handwriting is on record — she signed documents as a witness at my divorce seven years ago. Your forensics team will find a match in under an hour.”
Reeves stepped forward with an evidence bag already open. She had been doing this long enough to have the bag ready.
Sophia set the rabbit and the note inside.
She looked at Marcus.
“The messages she sent me,” she said. “The photographs of Aurora. Run the number against every prepaid registered in New York in the last thirty days. She would have bought it recently — she didn’t know I was coming back until the gala.”
“I’ll have someone on it in ten minutes,” Marcus said.
“Five.”
He was already on his phone.
Sophia looked at Reeves. “The woman on your security footage. The service entrance at seven forty-two. She would have had help — someone who knew the building layout well enough to identify the fire escape access point and the window latch. That’s not information you find from the outside. Someone talked.”
Reeves nodded. “We’re already pulling staff records.”
“Pull them faster.” Sophia moved toward the kitchen. “And I need a room. Somewhere I can work that isn’t this hallway.”
***
She set up at the kitchen table.
Elena sat across from her, no longer hollow-eyed, operating now on the same cold clarity that Sophia had switched into.
Sophia opened her laptop.
“Seraphina’s assets,” she said. “What do we know.”
“She’s been living on the Blackwood account,” Elena said. “Or she was. I don’t know if that’s still active.”
“It won’t be. Andrew’s finance team has been reviewing everything since the shares surfaced. If she was running expenses through Blackwood accounts they’ll have flagged it.”
Sophia pulled up a document. “Which means she’s been operating on her own funds for at least the past forty-eight hours. Which means there’s a trail.”
“Hotels?”
“She was at The Pierre two days ago. Whether she’s still there—” Sophia looked at Marcus across the room. “The Pierre. Check if Seraphina Cole has a current reservation. And every hotel within six blocks.”
Marcus relayed the instruction into his phone without breaking stride.
Sophia looked back at her laptop.
Seraphina had planned this. The compromised window latch meant she had been inside this building before tonight, which meant she had a contact here.
Which meant she had been preparing for longer than the five days since the gala. Which meant this had not been a panic response to Sophia’s return.
This had been waiting. Get faster updates on g.com.
Seraphina had been waiting too.
The thought was cold and clarifying and it told Sophia something important about the state of her stepsister that she filed away and would use later.
Her phone buzzed.
She looked at it expecting the unknown number.
It was Andrew.
She stared at his name on the screen for one second. Two. Three.
Then she answered it.
“Sophia.” His voice was immediate. No preamble. “What happened. I saw you leave and then Marcus called someone in the lobby and I—” He stopped. “Tell me what happened.”
She looked at the kitchen wall.
“Aurora is missing,” she said.
Silence.
“Since when,” he said. His voice was very quiet.
“Approximately eight twenty this evening. We found the room empty at nine fifteen.” She kept her voice level. “Seraphina took her.”
Another silence. Shorter this time.
“Where are you.” It wasn’t a question anymore. It was something else. Something she didn’t have a name for and didn’t have time to examine.
“The penthouse. Detective Reeves is here. Marcus is here.”
“I’m coming.”
“Andrew—”
“I’m coming, Sophia.”
The line went quiet.
She set the phone down on the table and looked at it and told herself she had accepted because having Andrew Blackwood’s resources alongside her own was a tactical decision and nothing more and she almost believed it.
***
He arrived in fourteen minutes.
She heard the lift and then voices in the hallway — Marcus and then Andrew’s voice low and direct — and then he was in the kitchen doorway.
He looked at her first.
Then he looked at the room. At Elena. At the laptop and the documents and the evidence bags on the counter and Detective Reeves on her phone in the corner.
He took it all in with the rapid systematic assessment of a man who had walked into crisis situations before and knew how to read them.
Then he looked back at Sophia.
“Tell me everything,” he said.
She told him.
All of it — the messages, the photograph in the park, the four words in the lift, the rabbit, the note. She told him in the flat precise way she had been telling Reeves.
He listened without interrupting.
When she finished he was quiet for a moment.
“The Pierre,” he said.
“We’re checking.”
“She won’t be there anymore.” He moved to the table and sat across from her and put his phone on the surface between them. “She was at The Pierre because I was paying for it. She’s been on the Blackwood account for three years — hotels, expenses, a monthly allowance that I stopped forty-eight hours ago when my finance team flagged it during the share review.”
Sophia looked at him.
“It wouldn’t have changed tonight,” Sophia said. “This was planned before yesterday.”
He looked at her. Something moved through his eyes that she recognised from a long time ago — the particular look he had when he was holding himself responsible for something.
“I know where she might be,” he said.
Sophia went still. “Where.”
“There’s a property. A house in Connecticut — Westport. My father bought it thirty years ago and it’s been in a subsidiary holding since then. It’s not registered under my name or any active Blackwood entity — it goes through an old management company that Vivienne would know about because she was present when my father’s estate was settled.” He paused. “Nobody else would know to look there.”
Sophia looked at him for a long moment.
Then she looked at Reeves across the room. “Did you hear that.”
Reeves was already moving. “Address,” she said to Andrew.
He gave it without hesitation.
Reeves was on her radio before he had finished the last word, moving into the hallway, her voice low and urgent.
Within thirty seconds Sophia could hear the change in the quality of activity outside the kitchen.
The kitchen was quieter now. Just Sophia Andrew, Elena, the open laptop and Aurora’s absence sitting in the middle of the room.
Andrew looked at the table.
“She’s five years old,” he said quietly.
It was not a question.
Sophia looked at him.
She thought about the terrace at the Hargreaves dinner. His voice when he had said *I need to know.* The question he had been three words away from asking when Marcus had called.
She thought about five years and the decision she had made in the cab going uptown in the morning and every day since that she had maintained that decision and told herself it was right.
She thought about Aurora’s rabbit in an evidence bag on the counter.
“Yes,” she said.
Andrew looked up at her.
“She’s five years old,” Olivia said. “She was born on the fourteenth of March. She likes pigeons and asks questions about bridges and she named a wild pigeon Gerald last week and she is—”
Her voice stayed level. It stayed completely level. “She is the most important thing in the world to me and I need her back tonight.”
Andrew looked at her for a long moment.
His eyes were very steady and very dark and she watched him understand.
“We’ll get her back tonight,” he said.
He said it the way she had said it to Elena.
Building it out of pure will. Stacking it brick by brick.
She recognised it because she had been doing the same thing for the past two hours.
His phone lit up on the table between them.
He looked at it. Then at her.
“Connecticut State Police are moving,” he said.
Sophia stood.
“Then so are we,” she said.