Chapter 256

In the chaos, Elia — who had come back to the doorway to look for her mother — was grabbed. A guard caught her around the waist and lifted her off the stairs.

“Mommy!”

“Elia!” Cailin lunged forward, but Hilliard was already there. He wrapped his arms around her from behind, locking her arms to her sides.

“It’s over,” Hilliard said, his voice strained.

“Let her go!” Cailin screamed, twisting and thrashing against him. “Hilliard, let her go!”

The guard carried a kicking, shrieking Elia toward one of the waiting SUVs.

“Take her to the hospital,” Hilliard ordered. “Keep her safe.”

“No! No! No!” The sounds tearing out of Cailin were not words anymore. They were the sound of something breaking that might never be made whole again.

The tarmac was a scene from hell. The jet engines whined, the helicopter rotors chopped the air, and Elia’s screams cut through the dark.

Hilliard held Cailin tightly. She had stopped fighting. She went limp against him, sobbing.

“I’m sorry,” Hilliard whispered into her hair. “I’m doing this for us. For her.”

“You’re a monster,” Cailin choked out.

“I’m a father,” Hilliard said.

Kegan appeared at the top of the stairs, an assault rifle in his hands.

“Let her go, Hilliard!” he shouted.

Hilliard’s guards raised their weapons. A standoff settled over the tarmac like a held breath.

“You fire, and we all die,” Hilliard called up to him. “There’s jet fuel everywhere.”

Kegan looked at Cailin. He saw the desperation in her eyes. He saw Elia being loaded into the SUV.

He reached into his vest and pulled out two canisters.

Smoke grenades.

He yanked the pins and hurled them onto the tarmac.

Hisss.

Thick white smoke erupted and swallowed everything.

“Secure the girl!” Hilliard shouted, blinded.

In the smoke, Cailin came alive.

She didn’t run for the plane. She twisted in Hilliard’s grip and raised her hands to his face — not to strike, but to hold him still. To make him look at her.

“Hilliard,” she said. Her voice was calm. Eerily calm.

He looked down, trying to find her face through the haze.

“If I die tonight,” she whispered, her lips brushing his ear, “will you regret this?”

“What?” Hilliard frowned.

As he spoke, her left thumb drove precisely into the pressure point just below his jaw. A white-hot bolt of paralyzing pain detonated through his neck. His whole body seized involuntarily, his grip failing all at once.

Hilliard let out a choked, guttural sound and staggered.

Cailin shoved him away and disappeared into the smoke.

“Cailin!” Hilliard clutched his neck, the muscles already beginning to spasm. He lurched toward the stairs. “She’s not here!” Kegan shouted from the doorway. “She ran the other way!”

Hilliard stopped.

The other way. Toward the highway.

“No,” he whispered.

He turned and ran through the smoke — away from the plane, away from the helicopter — and burst out of the white cloud into open darkness.

A figure was sprinting across the black grass toward the perimeter fence. Toward the interstate.

She wasn’t trying to escape. She was trying to draw them away from the children.

Or worse.