Chapter 15 Jack #2
My knees buckled. I caught myself on the doorframe, hand slapping against wood. A wave of nausea hit so hard I tasted bile.
Whose blood? Daisy's? Anna's?
Please not Daisy. Please God, not Daisy. Take me instead. Take anything. Take everything. Just not her—
It was all my fault. I brought Anna here. I engineered this. I surveilled her, lured her, made her part of our lives. And in doing so, I'd painted a target on my daughter's back. And now I couldn’t imagine losing Anna either.
All my money. All my security. All my fucking control—
Worthless. Ash. Meaningless.
A groan from the living room yanked me back.
Officer Martinez.
I stumbled back down the hall, nearly tripping.
He was trying to sit up, one hand pressed to his head, eyes unfocused and glassy. I dropped to my knees beside him, gripping his shoulder hard enough to leave marks.
"Where are they?" The words came out somewhere between a shout and a snarl. "What the hell happened? WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER?"
He winced, blinking hard. "Mr. Spencer... I'm sorry... so sorry—"
"I don't need sorry! I need to know where they are!" I was shaking him now, desperation overriding any concern for his injury. "Talk to me, Martinez!"
"Maintenance." The word came out slurred. "Guy in a maintenance uniform... said there was a gas leak in the pipes... I turned to check the panel and—" He touched his head, fingers coming away red. "Fast. Professional. Hit me from behind before I even heard him move."
But I already knew. Carter was too smart to leave a trail. He'd planned this. Every second I'd been at that cemetery having my emotional breakthrough, he'd been here. Watching. Waiting. Executing.
The failure was mine. Not Officer Martinez's.
Sirens wailed outside, growing closer. James. I must have triggered a silent alarm in my panic.
I stumbled toward my office, driven by some mechanical need to do something—check the feeds, call someone, anything but stand there drowning in helplessness.
That's when I saw it.
A single sheet of my own monogrammed stationery. The expensive cream-colored kind with "JHS" embossed at the top. Placed squarely in the center of my otherwise pristine desk like a calling card.
The handwriting was that same sharp, aggressive slant from the florist card.
You took something from me, Jack. Twenty months of my life. So I'm taking something from you.
The words blurred. I read them twice. Three times. As if the next read would change the impossible reality in front of me.
He had them.
Carter had my daughter. He had Anna.
The note was monogrammed with my own damn initials, a deliberate mockery. He'd used my stationery. Probably taken it from this very desk while my daughter slept down the hall and I'd been miles away, talking to a gravestone.
My hands curled into fists, crumpling the edges of the paper.
Moments later, James burst through the door, followed by a wave of uniformed police and paramedics. His face was grim as he took in the scene, his detective's mind cataloging the evidence.
He came to me as the paramedics attended to Martinez. "Jack. Talk to me."
"He has them. There was blood on Daisy’s windowsill." The words felt ripped from somewhere beyond language. "He left a note."
James paced the room while he spoke. "We have an APB out on him. We'll check traffic cams, building's external feeds—"
"He's not driving around with them," I said, desperate intuition clawing through panic. "He wants a scene. A statement. He'll take her back to where it started. Where he had control."
James's eyes locked on mine. "The apartment."
"The apartment they shared. He'll want to drag her back into that past. He thinks it's his territory."
James was already moving, barking into his radio. "I need a tactical team at 2147 Briarwood Lane, apartment 4B. Possible hostage situation. Suspect armed and dangerous. Five-year-old child and one adult female. ASAP!"
He grabbed my arm as I moved to follow. "Jack, you can't—"
"He has my daughter."
My phone buzzed in my hand.
I almost didn't look. But some terrible instinct made me glance at the screen.
Unknown number. A video file. And a single line of text:
Unknown Number
Watch me.
My thumb was shaking so badly I had to try twice to tap it. The video loaded, a buffering circle spinning, then the image resolved.
The footage was grainy, shaky, and taken in a dim, familiar space. Beige walls. Brown carpet. A sagging couch I recognized from surveillance photos. Her old apartment.
The camera panned left, and there she was.
Anna. On her knees on that brown carpet. Her face was pale as paper, a livid red mark blooming across her left cheek in the distinct shape of a hand. Her lip was split, a thin line of blood tracking down her chin.
But her arms—God, help me please, they wrapped protectively around Daisy, holding my daughter against her back. Daisy's small body was pressed so close they looked fused. Her face was buried in Anna's neck, her hands fisted in Anna's shirt, her entire small frame trembling.
"Wave to Daddy, Daisy." Carter's voice came from off-camera, smooth, almost pleasant. "Let him see you're okay."
Daisy didn't move. Just pressed closer to Anna, who tightened her grip.
"I said, wave." The smoothness dropped away, replaced by something sharp and violent.
"Don't touch her." Anna's voice was hoarse but clear. Her whole body angled, trying to shield Daisy. "You want me, Carter. This is about me. Let the child go. Please. She's five years old—"
"Shut. Up." A sound I couldn't see but could imagine. A slap, a shove. Anna's head snapped to the side, but she didn't let go of Daisy. Just absorbed whatever he'd done and held on tighter.
Then Anna looked up. Not at Carter. Directly into the camera lens.
Her eyes were wide with terror so raw it made my hand bleed from my nails digging into my skin. But beneath that terror was something fierce and desperate and unbreakable. The eyes of a woman who would burn before she let go of the child behind her.
Her lips moved, barely audible over Daisy's muffled sobs:
"I'm sorry, Jack. I'm so sorry."
The video cut to black.
I stared at the screen. At my own reflection in the dead glass. The man looking back was someone I didn't recognize. Eyes too wide. Face drained of color. Jaw clenched so tight I could hear my teeth grinding.
Then something broke. Or maybe something that had been broken for two years finally, catastrophically healed in the worst possible way.
The fragile thread of my civility, of my belief in systems and laws and justice, snapped.
Clean. Irrevocable.
"Jack?" James's hand on my shoulder. "Jack, we have units en route. Tactical is mobilizing—"
I didn't hear him. Couldn't hear anything except Carter's voice. Couldn't see anything except Daisy trembling and Anna bleeding.
I pushed past James, heading for the door.
"Jack!" He grabbed my arm. "You can't—"
I turned on him, and whatever he saw in my face made him take a step back. His hand dropped.
"He has my daughter," I said, my voice coming from the deepest parts of my grief. Unrecognizable as my own. "He hurt Anna. He brought them back to that apartment to make Anna relive every moment of terror."
"So here's what's going to happen. You're going to take me to that address. Your team is going to get Daisy and Anna out safely. And if Carter Wilson is still breathing when I get in that room, he won't be for long."
James stared at me.
"If you try to stop me," I continued quietly, "I will go through you. I will take your car. I will run every red light and break every law between here and there. The only question is whether you're coming with me or getting out of my way."
A long moment. Then James nodded once, sharply. "My car. Now. But Jack—we do this smart. We get them out safe. No rushed decisions or mistakes. Agreed?"
I wanted to say no. Wanted to tear out of there with nothing but blind rage and my bare hands. But James was right. Daisy came first. Anna came first.
"Agreed," I growled.
As we ran for James's car, as we peeled out of the garage with sirens wailing, I made a vow in the silence of my own mind.
If Carter Wilson had hurt one hair on Daisy's head, if he had struck Anna one more time—
There would be no arrest. No trial. No lawyers and appeals and endless machinery of justice that had already failed us once.
The billionaire was gone. The CEO was gone. The grieving widower who played by the rules was gone.
What remained was something stripped down to bone and base instinct: a father, a protector, teetering on the edge of a vengeance that would consume everything.
Starting with the monster who dared to touch his family.