For one heartbeat the dining room was perfectly black and perfectly silent.Then Vivian screamed, and the first gun went off.Muzzle flashes lit the room in white bursts, like a camera going off again and again. Glass exploded behind me. The chandelier swung and rattled over our heads, and bullets chewed into the wall where Jason had been standing a second ago.My body moved before my mind caught up.I grabbed Natalie by the wrist and pulled her down off her chair, under the heavy oak table, and pressed her flat against the floor."Stay down," I said into her ear. "Don't move, don't scream, don't stand up for anything.""Adam, what's happening? Who are...""Not now."Harold was still sitting upright at the head of the table, frozen, his walking stick in his fist, his mouth open. Seventy-six years old and too proud to duck. I rolled out from under the table, hooked my arm around his chest, and dragged him sideways off his chair and behind the thick stone pillar by the fireplace. He was

When the first police car skidded into the driveway, I was still sitting on the hallway floor with my back against the wall.Behind me, the unlocked cellar door creaked open, and the family came up the stone steps one by one, blinking, shaking, clutching each other. Tyler saw me first."There he is! He had a gun! I heard him, he was giving orders like a...""Tyler, shut up," Natalie said.He stared at her, stunned. In twenty-eight years, I don't think his big sister had ever once told him to shut up.Then the lights came back on, one of the officers had found the cut cable and patched it, and the whole house filled with police.They found the bodies one by one. A man under the dining table. A man by the windows. A man behind the kitchen counter in a pile of copper pots. Two at the bottom of the main staircase. One on the back terrace in the rain. I heard the young officers swearing quietly to each other as they counted.An hour later, long after midnight, a big man in a rumpled grey c

At eight o'clock exactly, Natalie knocked on the door of my own room.In two years, she had never done that. We lived in the same little cottage at the back of the Prescott grounds, but we lived the way two strangers share a train carriage: polite, quiet, careful not to touch. Her room was on the left. Mine was on the right. The kitchen in the middle was neutral ground."Come in," I said.She stepped inside and looked around. There wasn't much to see. A narrow bed I rarely slept in. An old armchair by the window, where I sat most nights with the lights off. A shelf of books, a small toolbox, a photo of my mother turned face down because I couldn't look at it on bad days.Natalie sat on the edge of the bed. I stayed in my armchair."I lied to a police officer last night," she said. "I've never lied to anyone in my life, Adam. Not even to my mother. And I lied for you.""I know. Thank you.""Don't thank me. Explain." She folded her hands in her lap, the way I imagined she did when she s

Natalie had seen the screen over my shoulder. Her face had gone white.I stood up, slid the phone into my pocket, and walked out of the living room into the back hallway, past the police officer at the door, as if I only needed some air. She followed me ten seconds later."Show it to the detective," she whispered. "Right now, Adam.""No.""No?" She grabbed my arm. "They have my mother! There's a detective sitting twenty feet away with a whole police department behind him!""And the message says if I bring police, she dies.""They always say that! That's what kidnappers say in movies, and then the police save everyone!""Natalie, listen to me." I kept my voice low and steady. "These aren't movie kidnappers. These are the same people who walked into your grandfather's house dressed as waiters. They cut the cameras an hour early. They hit the yacht club from the water, where nobody was watching. They plan everything. If they see one police car within a mile of that shipyard, your mother

"Vivian, now!" I shouted.I'll never know how she understood. Maybe it was fear. Maybe it was something older and stronger than fear. But Vivian Prescott threw her whole body sideways, and the metal chair tipped over and crashed to the concrete floor just as the woman's pistol fired.The bullet sparked off the floor where Vivian's head had been a heartbeat earlier.My own gun was already out. I fired once, and the pistol flew from the woman's hand, spinning away across the floor into the shadows. She cried out, shaking her grazed, bleeding knuckles, and then she came at me anyway, one-armed, a knife suddenly in that same stinging hand.She was fast, faster than any of her men. She slashed at my throat, missed by a finger's width, and slashed again, and the blade opened a line of fire across my forearm right over the old burn scars. I caught her wrist, twisted, and drove her backward into a stack of crates. The knife clattered away.She was still fighting when I pinned her to the floor