Part 2: The cruel kitchen staff pushed the quiet temp maid into the mute matriarch's room for a laugh, completely unaware that she spoke the family's secret private sign language.

The lodge plunged into organized chaos.

Ronan slammed the heavy deadbolts into place, locking the steel-reinforced doors. Victor appeared at the top of the grand staircase, an automatic rifle held across his chest, shouting orders over an encrypted comms channel.

"We have four hostiles advancing from the north dock, two more on the gravel road!" Victor reported, descending the stairs two at a time. "They cut the landlines and jammed the satellite relay. Cell service is down."

"It’s Silas’s private strike team," Ronan said, his voice terrifyingly calm. He stro固 towards a concealed panel beside the stone fireplace, punch-coding an eight-digit sequence into an antique wall sconce. The entire side of the hearth swung outward, revealing an armory that rivaled a military outpost. "Silas isn't waiting for the council meeting on Friday. He knows we found the ledger."

Ronan pulled a sleek submachine gun from the rack, tossing it to Victor, then racked the slide on a customized .45 caliber pistol. He turned toward Sadie, who had already crossed the room to shield Eleanor, guiding the matriarch away from the exterior windows.

"Can you shoot?" Ronan asked Sadie, his eyes piercing through the dim ambient light of the hearth fire.

"Julian taught me," Sadie replied, stepping forward and extending her hand.

Ronan placed a compact 9mm into her grip without hesitation. The weight of the steel was familiar, cold, and grounding.

Suddenly, a violent vibration hummed against Sadie’s hip.

She froze.

Her personal burner phone—the one she kept hidden in her boot, the one only Mrs. Higgins had the number for—was buzzing. Because Silas’s team had used a localized directional jammer aimed at the lodge’s roof antennas, the low-band cellular network was barely scraping through on a single, flickering bar.

Sadie pulled the phone from her boot, ducking behind the kitchen island.

"Sadie!" Mrs. Higgins’s voice screamed through the receiver, drowned in tears and terrifying static. "They ran us off the road! Route 9... near the old quarry! They took—"

The call was violently severed.

In its place, a raspy, sickeningly familiar voice boomed through the speaker before the call ended completely:

"Tell my dear nephew Ronan that if he wants to see Julian’s little bastard alive, he brings the cipher box to Pier 19 before dawn."

*Beep. Beep. Beep.*

The world stopped. The lodge, the gunfire beginning to rattle against the reinforced shutters outside, the smell of cordite—everything evaporated into a blinding, deafening silence.

Poppy.

They had Poppy.

"Sadie?" Ronan was standing over her, his eyes narrowed as he caught the shattered expression on her face. He grabbed the phone from her limp fingers, looking at the disconnected screen. "Who was that? What did Silas take?"

Sadie looked up at the brother of the man she had loved. She looked at the man who commanded armies of ruthless men, who held the Cain empire in his iron fist.