I came home to find my daughter Violet on the floor, her face beaten beyond recognition, and the security system still GREEN. The police said robbery, but the alarm had been turned off from INSIDE. The door was not forced. She let them in.

By 4:00 A.M., the thirty-second floor of Whitmore & Vance Consulting looked less like a corporate headquarters and more like a crime scene.

Three unmarked state police cruisers were parked haphazardly across the loading zone outside. Uniformed troopers stood guard at the elevators, while state investigators in blue windbreakers cataloged filing cabinets, seized hard drives, and hauled away encrypted server towers.

Detective Grant was brought down from the executive washroom in handcuffs, his face mottled with purple rage as two state troopers shoved him into the back of a patrol car. He didn't look at me as he passed, but his eyes promised a silent, venomous hatred that I didn't care about in the slightest.

Kevin Vance was already seated in the interrogation van downstairs, his designer suit wrinkled, his spirit entirely broken.

I stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows of Kevin’s former office, watching the first pale streaks of dawn break across the eastern horizon. The sky was a bruised palette of lavender and steel gray.

Lena walked up beside me, handing me a steaming cup of black coffee from a portable brewer one of the state troopers had set up.

“You okay, Mason?” Lena asked softly, taking a sip from her own paper cup.

“I won't be okay until I’m back at the hospital holding my daughter’s hand,” I replied, staring down into the dark liquid of the coffee. “How long before the arrest warrants for Grant’s co-conspirators are fully executed?”

“State Prosecutor signed them twenty minutes ago,” Lena said, tapping the screen of her tablet. “The entire network—from the money laundering ring Kevin was running to the internal precinct officers who helped Grant suppress evidence—is being rolled up right now. They won't see daylight for decades.”

I closed my eyes, letting out a long, shuddering breath. The weight that had crushed my chest since the moment I walked into my house and found Violet on the floor finally began to lift.

“Thank you, Lena,” I said, turning to look at her. “I owe you everything.”