She believed one vicious kick to a billionaire’s pregnant wife inside the privacy of a luxury hospital suite would end a marriage without consequences. She was wrong.

“The nursery!” Marcus roared, dropping the television remote and sprinting out of the bedroom.

Khloe’s heart stopped. She ripped the fetal monitor band off her stomach, ignoring the frantic beeping of the machine, and swung her legs out of bed. The pain in her side flared instantly, but pure adrenaline masked the agony. She grabbed the IV pole to steady herself and limped after her husband.

“Marcus! Wait!” Khloe screamed.

Marcus tore down the hallway, bursting through the doors of the nursery. The room was dark, lit only by the soft glow of the city skyline through the window.

The security guards stationed in the hallway rushed in behind him, guns drawn.

Marcus flipped the light switch.

The room was perfectly untouched. The white crib, the stuffed animals, the rocking chair—everything was exactly as they had left it. There was no bomb. There was no intruder.

“Clear!” Miller shouted, his team sweeping the room in seconds.

Marcus stood in the center of the nursery, his chest heaving, his mind spinning. Why? Why would Silas make a public threat about the nursery if there was nothing here?

Khloe leaned heavily against the doorframe, gasping for air. “Marcus… it’s a distraction.”

Suddenly, the lights in the penthouse flickered.

Then, they completely died.

The penthouse plunged into absolute, suffocating darkness. A second later, the red emergency backup lights kicked on, casting the hallway in a sinister, bloody glow.

“Talk to me!” Miller yelled into his earpiece. “Command, report! Why are the lights out?”

Static hissed through the earpiece.

“Command, do you copy?” Miller’s voice pitched with panic. “Sir, the entire building’s power grid just went down. It’s not a localized outage. They hit the main city block.”

Marcus rushed to Khloe, wrapping an arm around her waist to support her. “We need to get her to the panic room. Now.”

Before they could move, the massive flat-screen television in the nursery—which was apparently hardwired to an independent battery backup—flashed to life in the dark room.

It wasn’t broadcasting the news anymore.

It was a live video call.

Silas Thorne’s face filled the screen. He was no longer at the charity gala. He was sitting in the back of his Maybach, bathed in the glow of a laptop screen.

“Did you enjoy the scavenger hunt, Marcus?” Silas chuckled, his voice echoing through the silent, red-lit nursery.

“You son of a bitch!” Marcus screamed at the screen. “If you come near my wife, I will tear you apart with my bare hands!”

“Oh, I have no intention of coming near your wife,” Silas said smoothly. “I don’t need to. I told you, Marcus, you rely too much on brute force. I rely on architecture.”

Silas tapped a button on his end.

The camera angle shifted. It was no longer showing Silas. It was showing Isabella Rossi.

She was standing on the roof of the Thorne penthouse building. The wind was whipping her dark hair around her face. She looked down at the camera, her eyes wide, manic, and completely unhinged.

“He promised me, Marcus,” Isabella’s voice crackled through the speakers, sounding distant and hollow against the wind. “Silas promised me that if I destroyed your reputation, I would get everything back. He promised me he would get rid of Khloe.”

Isabella let out a broken, hysterical laugh, stepping closer to the edge of the roof.

“But he lied. He didn’t want Khloe dead. He wanted YOU destroyed. And he told me exactly how to do it.”

Khloe gripped Marcus’s arm, terror icing her veins. “Marcus, the building’s ventilation system…”

On the screen, Isabella held up a heavy steel canister. It was marked with toxic warning symbols.

“Carbon monoxide is odorless, Marcus,” Isabella smiled, her tears blowing away in the wind. “It’s heavy. It sinks. I poured it directly into the penthouse’s main intake valve on the roof five minutes ago. Your emergency backup generators are just sucking it inside.”

Marcus’s blood ran cold. The panic room ran on the same ventilation system. They were trapped in a glass box in the sky, and the air was quickly turning to poison.

Isabella looked at the camera one last time, a tragic, obsessive longing in her eyes. “If I can’t have you, Marcus… no one will.”