My doctor father held my head over an open oven until my hair caught fire, completely unaware the burn unit director was about to expose his torture pattern.

The isolation room fell dead silent after security swept the floor. Dr. Vance locked the secondary deadbolt and leaned against the door, her chest heaving beneath her lab coat.

“She wasn't lying about Miller,” Vance said, checking her phone. “Judge Miller has issued a provisional order. It’s sitting on the hospital director’s desk right now. Richard’s lawyers are giving the administration two hours to surrender you, or they’ll bring the county sheriff to execute the warrant.”

I sat up on the bed, ignoring the blinding spike of pain that shot across my scalp. “We have to go to Cedar Ridge.”

Vance stared at me. “Olivia, you’re in no condition to leave this unit. Your scalp needs continuous sterile treatment for the next forty-eight hours, or you risk systemic sepsis.”

“If Richard takes me, I won't survive forty-eight hours anyway,” I said, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed. “You heard Cynthia. They don't just want the clinic; they want me locked in St. Jude’s where my father’s friends run the psych ward. Once I’m in there, an accidental overdose is remarkably easy to arrange.”

Vance’s jaw clenched. She knew I was right. In the closed ecosystem of provincial medical politics, Richard Brennan had spent thirty years burying bodies behind pristine legal paperwork.

“The attic safe,” Vance said softly. “You’re certain the evidence on Clara Webb is there?”

“Eleanor had the only master key to the clinic’s original Victorian annex,” I said, reaching beneath my hospital gown and pulling out the small silver chain Eleanor had hung around my neck on her deathbed. A heavy, antique iron skeleton key dangled between my collarbones. “Dad could never crack the safe because Eleanor had the tumbler locked to this physical bypass key. He kept the papers there because he thought no one could ever open it without destroying the titanium housing.”

Vance looked at the key, then looked at me. A slow, reckless resolve settled into her eyes.

“My car is in the physicians' basement bay,” Vance said, tossing me a pair of dark surgical scrubs and a wide, soft cotton scrub cap to protect my bandaged scalp. “We have ninety minutes before the sheriff arrives.”

Twenty minutes later, the headlights of Dr. Vance’s black SUV cut through the pre-dawn fog as we sped away from Memorial Hospital, taking the winding backroads that led up into the forested hills of Cedar Ridge.

The sky was turning the color of bruised slate when we pulled up to the iron gates of the estate.

The Victorian clinic stood on the bluff—a sprawling, three-story Gothic building of dark stone and ivy, flanked by the old Brennan family manor. It was completely dark.

Except for the top floor.

In the small, arched window of the attic, a single yellow light was burning.

Vance killed the engine, our headlights plunging the gravel drive into absolute blackness.

“Olivia,” Vance whispered, pointing up toward the attic window.

A figure was standing at the glass, looking down at us.