Chapter 19

The rain started falling heavily as Cole and I drove away from the prison. The rhythmic thumping of the windshield wipers did little to ease the tension suffocating the interior of the car. Vale’s words echoed in my mind. The Architect. The Apex Key. My father had left behind a weapon to destroy the very monster he had helped create, and he had hidden it from everyone—even me.

I dialed Celeste’s number. It rang four times before dropping straight to a generic voicemail.

"She isn't answering," I told Cole, staring at the darkened highway ahead.

"I have local units heading to her apartment in Boston right now," Cole said, his grip tightening on the steering wheel. "But if this Architect has the resources Vale implied, local police might not be enough."

My phone buzzed. It was a message from Hannah.

I tracked the ping that breached our servers. It bounced through three proxy servers in Eastern Europe, but the origin point was local. Whoever did this is in Massachusetts.

"Hannah says the hacker is local," I relayed to Cole.

"They're closing the net," Cole muttered, pressing his foot harder on the accelerator.

Twenty minutes later, we pulled up to Celeste's upscale apartment building in the Back Bay. The lobby was quiet, the night doorman dozing behind his marble desk. Cole flashed his badge, startling the man awake, and demanded the master keycard for the penthouse.

We rode the elevator in silence. When the doors slid open, my heart sank.

The heavy mahogany door to Celeste’s apartment was slightly ajar. There were no signs of forced entry on the lock, but deep scratch marks scarred the wood near the handle, as if someone had dragged something heavy through the threshold.

Cole drew his sidearm, pushing the door open with his shoulder.

"Clear," he called out after sweeping the living room.

I stepped inside. The apartment was a disaster. Books were thrown from the shelves, cushions ripped open, and the antique writing desk where she had penned her letters of apology to my family was smashed to pieces.

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She was gone. But on the shattered remains of the desk, pinned under a broken lamp, was a single sheet of heavy stationary paper.

I carefully pulled it out. There were no words. Just a hand-drawn sketch of a star with a line driven straight through its center.