On my way. Don’t touch her.
No response.
Sullivan parked two blocks from the lighthouse, and they approached on foot. Rain soaked through their jackets within seconds. Brooks’s weapon felt heavy in his hand.
“FBI will have eyes on us in five minutes,” Sullivan murmured. “We just need to keep him talking until then.”
“And if we can’t?”
“Then we adapt.”
They reached the lighthouse grounds. The door stood open, darkness beyond. Brooks stepped inside, Sullivan covering him.
“Winston!” Brooks called. “I’m here. Let her go.”
Silence. Then footsteps on the spiral stairs above.
“Come up, Detective. Alone.”
Sullivan started to object, but Brooks shook his head. “Stay here. If I’m not back in five minutes, come get me.”
“Brooks—”
“Five minutes.”
Brooks began climbing the spiral stairs, each step taking him higher into the tower. His weapon stayed ready, his senses alert for any sound, any movement.
The iron steps rang under his boots. Water dripped from somewhere above, echoing in the confined space. Wind howled around the lighthouse walls, making the entire structure groan.
He climbed past the first landing, then the second. The lamp room was at the top. Where Lily had hidden her evidence twenty-five years ago. Where Winston now held Vivienne.
Brooks’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it. Focus on the stairs. On what waited above.
Another landing. The air grew colder as he climbed higher. His breath misted in front of him.
Then he heard it. Vivienne’s voice, muffled but unmistakable. She was alive. She was up there.
Brooks quickened his pace, taking the stairs two at a time now. His heart hammered against his ribs.
He reached the final landing. The door to the lamp room stood partially open, pale light spilling through.
Brooks took a breath, steadied his weapon, and pushed through the door.
What he saw inside made his blood run cold.
SEVENTEEN
vivienne
The lamp roomstank of old metal and fear.
Vivienne’s wrists burned where the zip ties cut into her skin. Winston had forced her to kneel in the center of the room. The space was empty now—the FBI had stripped it clean days ago, removing all the evidence, all the artifacts. Only dust outlines remained where crates had stood for decades, ghost impressions of the Aldrich family’s crimes.
“Brooks is coming.” Winston checked his phone again, pacing between the windows. Rain hammered the glass, turning the world outside into a blur of gray and black. “Good. I want him to watch.”
Blood trickled from Vivienne’s split lip where Winston had struck her when she’d tried to reach for her pendant. The silver chain lay broken on the floor three feet away, Mathilde’s protective stone glinting in the weak light. Without it, her connection to the spirits felt muted, like trying to hear through water.
But they were still there. She could sense them pressing against the boundaries of this world, desperate to help but unable to manifest strongly enough. Lily’s presence hoveredclosest, her spirit crackling with rage at Winston’s violation of the space where she’d died.
