The moment my twin daughters started screaming in the middle of the night, I was certain the new nanny had failed them. I stormed toward the nursery ready to fire her without a second thought. But the second I opened that door, everything I believed collapsed. The woman I blamed was doing the one thing I hadn't been able to do since my wife died—she made my daughters laugh.

The private jet touched down on the tarmac in Westchester with a violent jolt that sent a tremor through the landing gear. We hadn't even rolled to a complete stop before Declan was pulling open the cabin door, the freezing midnight wind howling into the cabin like a pack of starving wolves.

"Get the armored SUV ready," I barked over the screaming roar of the jet turbines, grabbing my heavy wool overcoat and shrugging into it as I bolted down the airstair steps.

Elise was right at my shoulder, her breath pluming in the freezing night air, her expression hardened into a mask of pure, unyielding resolve. She wasn't the scared young woman I had found dancing in the nursery anymore. She was a soldier in this war, and she refused to be left behind.

"The panic room can only be opened with my biometric master key or a high-level override code stored in the main estate server," I said rapidly as we piled into the back of the blacked-out Cadillac Escalade. Declan slammed the door shut, and the SUV fishtailed across the wet tarmac, accelerating rapidly toward the Manhattan estate. "Nobody outside of myself and Declan knows that code exists."

"Unless someone downloaded it from the server during Clara's breach," Elise countered sharply, her mind racing at lightning speed. "She wasn't just there to terrorize you, Dante. She was a distraction. While your security team was focused on her at the nursery door, someone else must have accessed the sub-basement terminal."

My jaw tightened until the bone ached. She was right. The timing was too precise, the execution too clean. Marcus Vance hadn't just financed a chaotic midnight raid; he had planted a backdoor trojan into my home’s physical network.

Twenty minutes later, the SUV tore through the iron gates of the estate, tires screeching against the cobblestone driveway. The mansion loomed against the ink-black sky, dark and foreboding, except for a single, pulsing amber light glowing above the east wing service entrance.

We burst through the front doors, our tactical security team falling in line behind us with weapons drawn.

"Clear the ground floor!" Declan ordered, motioning two armed guards toward the grand staircase while we pressed forward toward the private elevator leading down to the sub-basement bunker.

The air grew noticeably colder as we descended into the subterranean levels of the estate. The walls here were reinforced with two feet of solid steel and reinforced concrete, built to withstand a tactical siege. At the end of the long, fluorescent-lit corridor, the heavy steel door of the primary panic room stood wide open.

A single figure stood just inside the threshold, silhouetted against the banks of glowing server racks and emergency monitors.

I raised my Glock instantly, the barrel locking dead-center on the intruder's chest. "Hands where I can see them! Turn around slowly, or you're a dead man!"

The figure froze. Slowly, deliberately, the person raised their hands and turned around.