“Mom, don’t stop me.” Those five words turned my blood to ice.

The kitchen felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of it.

Graham instantly grabbed his phone, texting his head of security outside.

“Mom, what are you talking about?” I demanded, leaning over the counter. “Lily gave the flash drive to the DJ! The police have it!”

“No!” Eleanor wept wildly into the receiver. “That was just the first partition! Vanessa put a hidden encrypted file on that drive! Richard’s private server keys are on it! If the police decrypt that second file, Richard goes to prison for life!”

My mind raced back to the night of the wedding.

Lily standing on the stage.

The DJ plugging in the small pink drive.

“I found this in Aunt Vanessa’s bag,” Lily had said.

Then I remembered something that made my blood turn to absolute ice.

When the police collected the evidence from the Rosewood Estate the night of the wedding, they had confiscated the pink flash drive from the DJ booth.

But three weeks ago, while I was cleaning out Lily’s school backpack... I had found a second, identical pink drive sitting in the bottom pocket.

I had thought it was just a toy. I had tossed it into my desk drawer upstairs.

Lily hadn't pulled out Vanessa’s flash drive that night.

She had pulled out a duplicate she bought at the school book fair to copy the video.

The real flash drive—the one containing the keys to an international criminal syndicate—was sitting in my desk drawer upstairs right now.

“Claire?” Graham whispered, staring at my ghost-white face. “What is it?”

Before I could answer, a loud, violent crash echoed from the back patio.

CRASH!

The glass doors of the kitchen shattered inward.

The lights in the house instantly cut to black, plunging us into absolute darkness.

Outside, the sharp sound of suppressed gunfire erupted in the yard.

Graham grabbed my arm, pulling me down behind the heavy marble island as heavy footsteps began marching through the broken glass on the kitchen floor.

A flashlight beam cut through the darkness, locking directly onto my face.