Chapter 5
I picked Megan up ten minutes later.
She was huddled by the gas station doors, wrapped in a faded Portland Trail Blazers hoodie three sizes too big, her jeans torn at the knee, a scrape running down her left cheek. Her pink hair was gone—now it was a mousy brown, chopped short and uneven, like she’d cut it herself with kitchen scissors. But her eyes were the same. Bright, fierce, scared.
We stared at each other across the parking lot for a long second.
Then she ran.
She threw herself at me, and we hugged in the glare of the fluorescent lights, crying, laughing, hitting each other on the back like we were making up for twelve years of silence in ten seconds. She smelled like gasoline and fear and the coconut shampoo she’d used since we were nineteen.
“I’m so sorry,” she kept saying. “I’m so sorry I left. I’m so sorry I didn’t call. I’m so sorry—”
“Stop,” I said, pulling back. I wiped the tears from her face with my sleeve. “Apologies later. War now. Get in the car.”
She got in.
I drove toward the highway, heading south toward Lake Oswego. Voss’s estate was on the river, hidden behind twenty-foot walls and old-growth trees. I’d driven past the gates once on a work site visit—even from the road, you could tell the place was obscene.
Megan was already typing furiously on my phone. “I’m texting Alvarez. He’s the only cop in this city who isn’t on Voss’s payroll. I’ve been sending him anonymous tips for three weeks. He’s a good guy. He’ll help.”
“Voss said his daughter was in a car accident. That it pulled Alvarez away from the hospital.”
Megan snorted. “Voss’s daughter lives in Brooklyn with her wife. She hasn’t been in Oregon in two years. It was a lie. A good one, but a lie.” She hit send and dropped the phone in her lap. “Okay. Talk to me. What did Noah say? Did he seem scared? Did Voss hurt him?”
“Voss didn’t touch him. Not in front of me. But Noah was terrified. Megan… when Voss walked in the room, he went rigid. Like he was waiting to be hit.”
Her face darkened. “Voss has a temper. I’ve seen it. He never touched Noah—he was always too careful about that, too worried about leaving marks for the cameras—but he’d scream. Throw things. The night he showed up at the school? He slammed a desk so hard the leg broke. Noah hasn’t slept through the night since.”
We drove in silence for a minute.
“Emily?”
“Yeah?”
“Now that you know… how do you feel? About him. About Noah.”
I thought about the boy in the hospital bed. About the way he’d looked at me when he first saw my eyes. About the three squeezes of his hand. About how holding him had felt like coming home.
“I feel like I’ve been walking around with a hole in my chest for eleven years and I didn’t even know it was there until he filled it,” I said quietly. “I feel angry at myself for not knowing. For not fighting harder. For letting him grow up without me.”
“Hey.” Megan put her hand on my arm. “None of this is your fault. You did what you had to do. You were twenty-one. You were scared. You had no idea the adoption would go sideways. And for what it’s worth… I tried to give him the best life I could. We read every night. We went camping every summer. He’s good at math and terrible at sports and he draws these amazing pictures of dragons in the margins of his notebooks. He’s kind. He’s funny. He’s the best parts of both of us.”
She paused.
“And he’s got your stubborn streak. Trust me. That’s gonna come in handy tonight.”
I pulled off the highway onto the winding river road that led to Voss’s estate. The houses got bigger, the lots got wider, the streetlights got fewer and farther between. Five minutes later, I saw it. The gates. Massive black iron, twelve feet high, spiked at the top, with a security booth to the left. Cameras scanned the road from every angle.
I parked the car half a mile down the road, behind a clump of trees where we wouldn’t be seen.
“Okay,” Megan said, unbuckling. “Here’s the plan. I used to sneak onto this property when I was gathering evidence. I know a place where the fence is rusted through down by the boathouse. We cut through the woods, come up behind the main house, get in through the kitchen window—it’s always left unlocked for the cook’s smoke breaks. We find Noah, we get out, we meet Alvarez at the safe house in Sellwood with the USB drive. He’s gonna have a team waiting. We hand over the evidence, Voss goes down for kidnapping, fraud, conspiracy, whatever else they can pin on him, and we all live happily ever after.”
She said it like she was ordering coffee.
“That’s your plan?” I said. “Sneak onto a forty-million-dollar estate guarded by men with guns, kidnap my own son out from under the nose of a man who owns the police, and then run? That’s a terrible plan.”
“Got a better one?”
“…No.”
“Great. Let’s go.”
We climbed out of the car. The night was warm, thick with the smell of river water and pine. Megan led the way into the trees, moving with the easy, silent confidence of someone who had done this many times before. I followed, tripping over roots, my heart hammering so loud I was sure the guards at the gate could hear it.
Ten minutes of bushwhacking later, we reached the back fence. Sure enough, there was a section near the bottom where the chain link had rusted away, leaving a hole just big enough for two people to squeeze through. Megan went first, then helped me through.
On the other side, the Voss estate spread out before us. It was like something out of a movie. The main house was a twenty-thousand-square-foot stone mansion lit up like a Christmas tree, with a three-car garage, a swimming pool that glowed blue in the dark, a tennis court, and a separate guest house the size of my entire apartment. The lawn was perfectly manicured. Statues of naked people lurked in the flower beds.
“Disgusting, isn’t it?” Megan whispered. “He spends more on his rose garden every year than Noah and I made in five years combined.”
She grabbed my wrist. “Stay low. The cameras have blind spots along the hedge line. Stick close to me.”
We crept along the back of the property, keeping to the shadows of the hedge. Twice we saw guards walking the perimeter—big men with flashlights and guns on their hips. Both times we froze, pressed into the bushes, holding our breath until they passed.
The kitchen window was, as promised, unlocked. Megan slid it open and gestured for me to go first. I climbed through, dropping silently onto the tile floor. She followed, closing the window behind us.
The kitchen was the size of my living room. Marble counters, commercial-grade appliances, a chandelier over the island that probably cost more than my car. Everything was spotless. Cold. No sign that a child had ever set foot in it.
“Where would he put Noah?” I whispered.
“Guest wing. Second floor. East side. Far away from Voss’s master suite. He doesn’t like noise.”
We slipped out of the kitchen and into the main hallway. The floors were hardwood, polished so bright I could see my reflection. Portraits of Voss ancestors lined the walls—stern-looking men in suits, women in pearls, none of them smiling. At the end of the hall, a grand staircase curved up to the second floor.
We were halfway up when we heard voices.
Men’s voices. Coming from the study to our left. The door was ajar.
“…custody papers are airtight,” one voice said. Voss. “The boy is mine legally. Now we just need to make the Cole woman disappear permanently. And the Warren woman, too—she’s a loose end I don’t like. Make it look like a murder-suicide. Cole killed Warren out of jealousy, then killed herself. Clean. Simple. Nobody asks questions.”
My blood turned to ice.
Megan’s hand clamped down on my arm so hard I thought she’d break the bone.
Another voice—deeper, slower. “And the boy? What if he remembers? What if he talks?”
Voss laughed. It was a horrible sound. “He’s eleven. In a year, he’ll barely remember Megan Cole existed. In five, he’ll think of me as his real father. Kids are plastic. You just have to mold them right. By the time he’s old enough to inherit, he’ll be a proper Voss. He’ll forget all about the lady with two eyes.”
I saw red.
Before Megan could stop me, I wrenched my arm free and stormed toward the study door. I didn’t care about the plan. I didn’t care about the guards or the guns or the cameras. All I cared about was that this man had just sentenced us to death and was talking about my son like he was a puppy he could train.
I kicked the door open.
May you like
Voss was sitting behind a mahogany desk the size of a boat. Standing in front of him were the two bodyguards from the hospital. All three looked up, shocked.
“Speak of the devil,” Voss said, recovering first. He smiled. “Ms. Warren. And Megan. How nice of you to drop by. I was just talking about you.”
