SIXTEEN
JULIAN
The next morning, Olivia is finally discharged. The concussion symptoms have improved, the baby is fine, and I can finally bring her home.
The moment we step into the penthouse, the exhaustion of the last twenty-four hours catches up with her. She falls asleep on the couch almost immediately, wrapped tight in a blanket. I sit on the edge of the couch beside her, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest.
An hour later, the intercom rings. Security announces Detective Reyes.
I let her up. When the elevator doors open, Reyes steps out carrying a thick file. The tight look on her face immediately tells me she has something.
We move into my office so Olivia can sleep, but a few minutes later, the door pushes open and Olivia joins us anyway. She wraps her sweater tighter around herself and sits beside me.
Reyes spreads the file across the desk.
“We picked up the dark blue SUV on a few traffic cams right after the wreck,” she says.
“We can’t get a clear shot of the guy in the baseball cap through the windshield, and we lost the tail after a couple of blocks. We’re trying to track where it went from there.”
Every muscle in my body locks up. The trail went cold. They have the car, but they can’t prove who was driving it.
“The masks,” I say, the realization hitting me instantly.
I look at Reyes. “We received two packages. One was delivered to my office, a delicate, black woman’s mask, snapped in half.
The other was left right outside our door here at the penthouse for Olivia.
A heavy, plastic men’s mask that had been smashed and obsessively glued back together.
Both came with notes. I have this feeling they’re from Kieran. ”
Reyes straightens up, her eyes narrowing. “Do you still have them?”
“They’re in my safe,” I say, standing up and crossing to the locked cabinet in the corner of the office.
When I pull the boxes out and place them on the desk, Olivia visibly tenses beside me.
I hate making her look at them again, the jagged, severed metal of the lace mask and the ugly, scarred ridges of adhesive on the men’s frame are a direct reminder of how long he’s been stalking us. But we need this.
I push the boxes toward Reyes. “I should have given these to you sooner.”
Reyes studies the fractured pieces without touching them. “The delivery boxes are gone?”
“Unfortunately,” I say, a bitter taste in my mouth.
“These will do,” Reyes says. She pulls heavy plastic evidence bags from her case, carefully sliding the broken pieces inside before sealing them shut. “Hopefully he was careless and left a print. I’ll get these to the lab right away. The moment I have anything, I will let you know.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“We just want to be safe,” Olivia adds, her voice quiet but firm.
“We want to finally move on with our lives.”
Reyes nods and walks to the office door. I follow her out, walking her to the front entrance where my security team stands on guard in the hallway.
“I’ll talk to you soon, Mr. Thorne.” She holds out her hand. I offer my left hand to shake it, avoiding the ache in my right shoulder. She then turns and leaves.
Hours pass in a blur. Olivia and I try to find some version of normal in the quiet penthouse.
We sit together at the kitchen island, picking at a lunch neither of us really tastes.
Mostly, we just hold each other. I keep my good arm wrapped around her waist, pulling her flush against my side, needing to feel the reality of her warmth against the hot rage burning through my body.
Then my phone vibrates on the counter. Reyes.
I press the screen and put it to my ear before the first ring finishes. “Tell me you have something.”
A beat of silence on the other end. Then, Reyes speaks. “We found a print.”
My pulse spikes, a hard jolt of adrenaline hitting my chest.
“A partial thumbprint on the inside curve of the resin mask,” she says.
I stand up so fast my chair scrapes against the floor. Olivia’s eyes track me instantly, her face turning pale as the room goes still.
“And?” I demand.
Reyes exhales, the sound sharp through the line. “It matches Kieran Walsh.”
Silence. Complete, suffocating silence in my ears.
A cold, lethal calm settles into my bones as the reality sinks in. After all this time. After the kidnapping, the masks, the highway crash on the FDR. We finally have something solid. Something the system can’t ignore.
“The print was in the national database from a DUI arrest during his sophomore year of college,” Reyes continues, her voice taking on a hard, professional edge.
I close my eyes briefly, letting out a breath I feel like I’ve been holding for months. Finally.
Reyes clears her throat. “We’re requesting an arrest warrant right now.”
Relief hits me so hard I can barely breathe, but she doesn’t give me time to process it.
“Two more things while I have you,” she says.
“That SUV from the crash was a rental. Paid for in cash under the same fake name on the warehouse lease. No hired driver. It’s been him every single time.
And Marcus already found what he was looking for on the server side.
The IP address that leaked your boardroom numbers to the Chronicle traces straight back to Kieran’s home network. ”
Nausea hits me, cold and fast. He was working alone this entire time, close enough to touch, and we handed him every single opening.
“There’s something else,” she adds.
The sudden change in her voice makes my stomach drop. I quickly tap the screen, putting the call on speaker so Olivia can hear. She says nothing, only listens intently as Reyes speaks the words that finally lift a weight off my shoulders.
“We found him.”
I lean forward, staring at the phone on the desk as every muscle in my body locks up. “Where?”
“New Jersey.”
Olivia’s head snaps up from beside me, her eyes tracking the sudden shift in my posture.
“He’s been staying at his parents’ old property,” Reyes says. “That cross-jurisdiction file I mentioned a few weeks back, on the address tied to his file? It finally came through yesterday.”
A cold sweat breaks out across the back of my neck. “His parents are dead.”
“Exactly.” Reyes lets the silence hang between us for a heavy second before she drops the words neither of us saw coming. “We’ve reopened the Walsh homicide investigation.”
I look past the phone, my gaze fixing on the gray skyline outside the penthouse windows. “What?”
“Their bodies were found three years ago near the Passaic River.”
Olivia gasps, her hand flying to her mouth as all the color drains from her face. She tenses against my side, a low, trembling breath escaping her lips.
The room feels like it is shrinking, closing in on us. The old headlines flash through my mind, pieces of a story I barely paid attention to years ago. A brutal double homicide. No forced entry. No suspects. A total dead end.
Olivia grips my good arm, her fingers digging desperately into my sleeve as she stares at the phone in pure horror. The realization that we’ve been dealing with a monster capable of parricide hangs thick in the air.
“Kieran was a person of interest back then,” Reyes says, her voice breaking through the haze in my head. “But the local PD didn’t have enough to tie him to it.” A beat.
“Old neighbors from his childhood mentioned hearing screaming from that house years ago, back when Kieran was a kid. Nobody ever followed up on it.”
My jaw aches from how hard I’m clenching my teeth. I wrap my arm tighter around Olivia, feeling her trembling violently against me.
She continues. “Now he’s facing kidnapping, aggravated assault, stalking, criminal harassment, attempted murder, and multiple federal cybercrime charges. That gives us probable cause for warrants we couldn’t get near before.”
The thought that I had a potential killer working inside my company makes my blood run cold.
How did HR miss this when they vetted him?
Probably because there was no conviction, just unproven suspicion buried deep under a mountain of insufficient evidence that would never show up on a standard background check.
He didn’t just break into our lives. I handed him the keys.