The Rise Of The Betrayed Luna (Amorah and Holmes) novel Chapter 197

Chapter 197

Chapter 197

Lucia was sitting on the bedroom floor when her phone buzzed.

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She didn’t know how long she’d been there. Long enough that her back ached and the room had gone fully dark and nobody had come to turn on a light. She’d sat down after coming upstairs and just stayed there, her back against the bed frame, her knees pulled to her chest, staring at nothing.

The phone screen lit up the dark.

An unknown number. A message with no text. Just an attachment.

She opened it.

The image loaded slowly, pixel by pixel, and Lucia watched it come into focus the way a person watched something terrible happen that they couldn’t stop. Monica first, in the left side of the frame. Sitting in a wooden chair with rope around her wrists and her ankles. Her face was turned slightly toward the camera, eyes swollen from crying, tear tracks dried on both cheeks. Her art supply bag was still on her shoulder, the strap cutting across her chest.

Lena was on the right. Same chair, same rope, her chin lifted in a way that was trying to be brave and not quite managing it. Her eyes were red. Her hands were twisted together behind her back and her knuckles were white from the strain.

Both of them were looking at whoever held the camera.

Both of them looked terrified.

Lucia made a sound she had never made before in her life. It came up from somewhere below her stomach, below words, below anything she could have named or controlled. She pressed her hand over her mouth but it didn’t stop the sound. Nothing was going to stop it.

She was still making it when Alexander walked into the room.

He saw her face first. Then he crossed to her in four steps and took the phone from her hands and looked at the screen.

The change that moved through him was something Lucia would never forget. His face went through grief so fast it barely registered before something harder and more dangerous settled over it. His jaw locked. His chest heaved once. He looked at the photograph of his daughters tied to chairs in a place he didn’t know, and a sound came out of him that she had never heard from him either.

“Lena.” His voice broke completely on the single syllable. “Monica.”

Γ

He stood there holding the phone with both hands, his whole body rigid, staring at the image of his daughters. His eyes were bright. He was breathing through his nose in long deliberate pulls the way a man breathed when he was trying to hold himself upright through something unsurvivable.

Then he turned and walked out of the bedroom and Lucia heard him in the hallway.

“David. I need you now. Drop everything.” A pause. “I just received an image from an unknown number. I need the IP address traced, I need the origin of this message, I need to know the exact location this was sent from within the next twenty minutes.” Another pause, shorter. “I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care what you have to access. Find it.”

He came back into the bedroom. His assistant’s voice was still audible through the phone, rapid and efficient, already working.

Alexander set his phone on the dresser and looked at Lucia on the floor. He came down to her level without being asked, sitting on the floor beside her, his back against the bed frame the same as hers.

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12:31 pm P PPO

Chapter 197-

They sat in silence for a moment with the photograph still open on Lucia’s phone between them.

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“She still had her bag,” Lucia said. Her voice came out almost conversational, which was the most frightening thing about it. “Monica. She still had her art supply bag on her shoulder. She was so excited about those pencils.”

Alexander didn’t respond. There was nothing to say to that.

Lucia looked at the image again. At Monica’s swollen eyes. At Lena’s white knuckles. At the rope that had no business being anywhere near either of them.

“Bring them back to me.” Her voice dropped to almost nothing. “Please, Alexander. Bring my girls back.”

“I’m going to.” His voice came raw and stripped. “I swear to you I’m going to.”

Twenty minutes passed. Then his phone buzzed. He answered immediately, listened for less than a minute, and Lucia watched his expression close down.

“Dead end,” he said when he hung up. “Routed through multiple servers. Whoever sent this knew what they were doing. The trail goes cold in three different countries.”

Lucia pressed her eyes shut.

Then her own phone buzzed again.

Same unknown number. This time no image. Just text.

She read it twice before she could make sense of the words.

*This is just the beginning. You will feel every bit of the pain you inflicted on others. You thought you could destroy people’s lives and walk away untouched. Now you know better.*

She held the screen out to Alexander without speaking. He read it. His jaw tightened so hard she could see the muscle working.

“Marco.” His voice was barely above a whisper but there was nothing quiet about it.

“He knew which mall.” Lucia’s voice came out flat. “He already knew. And now this message. You will feel the pain you inflicted on others.” She looked at Alexander. “That’s his language. That’s what he’s been saying for months.”

“I know.”

“He hired Louis Dubois to track us. He hired men to surveil the children. He had their routines. He knew exactly when Monica and Lena would be there and what their security rotation looked like.” Lucia’s hands were shaking around the phone. “It was him. It was always going to be him.”

Alexander was already standing, already dialing.

“This is Alexander Kane.” His voice had gone completely cold, the warmth stripped out of it entirely, replaced by something hard and final. “I need to speak with Detective Morrison. Now.” A brief pause. “I have reason to believe Marco Hart is directly connected to the kidnapping of my daughters. I want him brought in for questioning tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight.” Another pause. “I don’t care about jurisdiction. I don’t care about process. If your department moves on this before morning, every resource I have is available to this investigation. If it waits until morning. I will find someone who doesn’t need to sleep on it.”

He ended the call.

The bedroom was very quiet.

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