Chapter 260

“Hello, little rat,” Charla whispered.

Elia pressed herself against the headboard. “Go away. I want my mommy.”

Charla moved to the foot of the bed. She set the fruit basket on the table and leaned forward.

“Your mommy isn’t coming,” she said. Her voice was soft — silk wrapped around a razor blade.

“She is!” Elia cried. “She promised!”

Charla produced her phone and held the screen up.

It was a photograph of the highway. The smashed truck. Red spread across the grass.

“See that?” Charla tapped the screen with a manicured nail. “That’s your mommy.”

Elia stared at the image. Her bottom lip trembled. Tears spilled silently down her cheeks.

“No…”

“Yes,” Charla hissed. “And do you know why?”

She circled the bed slowly and leaned close to Elia’s ear. She smelled of expensive perfume and something that had no name.

“Because you were bad,” she whispered. “Because you ran away. Because you made trouble. Mommy had to come find you, and the truck hit her. Squish.”

Elia pressed both hands over her ears. “Stop it! Stop it!”

Charla seized Elia’s wrists and pulled them down. Her grip was bruising.

“Listen to me,” she said, her eyes locked on the child’s. “Hilliard is furious. He knows you caused this. He’s going to send you somewhere with no windows. A place full of rats.”

Elia was sobbing now, her whole body shaking.

“Unless…” Charla released her wrists and smoothed Elia’s hair with a gentle, terrible hand. “Unless you go find her.”

Elia sniffled. “Find her? You said she was dead.”

“Her body is dead,” Charla said. “But her spirit is waiting for you. Downstairs. In the cold room. The basement.” She pointed toward the door. “If you’re brave enough to go down, you might be able to say goodbye. But you have to be fast — before the bad man comes back.”

Footsteps sounded in the hallway.

Charla straightened immediately and stepped back. Her face rearranged itself in an instant — the concerned, soft-spoken visitor returning as if it had never left.

A nurse came in.

“Oh, the poor thing,” Charla said, pressing a hand to her chest and dabbing at a tear that wasn’t there. “She misses her mother terribly.”

The nurse looked at Elia — curled in a tight ball, shaking — with an expression of genuine sympathy.

“I’ll let her rest,” Charla said.

She moved toward the door. At the threshold, she glanced back at Elia.

She mouthed one word.

Run.

The plane touched down on a runway lined with emergency vehicles, their lights strobing in the dark.

Before the engines had fully spooled down, the mobile stairs were already rolling into position.

Hilliard didn’t wait for the jet bridge. He ran up the stairs with his security team flanking him, bypassed the passenger cabin without a glance at the terrified flight attendants, and went directly to the cargo access panel in the belly of the aircraft.

“Open it,” he ordered the ground crew.

.