Chapter 12: The first word
678 Words
Three days.
That’s how long we had before Silas moved his daughter to the underground lab beneath the Alps the place he called “The Cradle.” Once she was there, no signal in or out. No rescue. Just a child’s mind wired into the last fragments of the Oracle.
We were in a safe house in Prague, rain tapping the windows like a countdown. My mother decrypted the last of Viktor’s files while Daniel mapped the bunker’s ventilation shafts.
“She’s never seen the sky,” I whispered, staring at the grainy photo Viktor had smuggled out. My daughter Liora standing by a window, hand pressed to the glass. “He’s kept her in that room her whole life.”
Kai didn’t look up from cleaning his rifle. “Then we give her the sky.”
I turned to him. “You believe her? When she said ‘Lena knows’?”
He finally met my eyes. “She has your fire. And my stubbornness. Of course she knows.”
A soft chime broke the silence.
My mother held up a tablet. “The truth virus worked. Phoenix agents are deactivating worldwide. But Silas… he’s gone dark. No comms, no movement.”
“Because he’s preparing for Phase Two,” Daniel said grimly. “He doesn’t need an army anymore. He has a weapon that looks like a little girl.”
I stood. “Then we don’t break in. We make him bring her to us.”
Kai frowned. “How?”
I walked to the desk and typed a message into a secure channel—one only Silas would monitor.
“You wanted a legacy, Father. But legacies aren’t built in bunkers. They’re born in the light. Meet me at Blackwater Cove. Sunset. Alone. Or I release the final Oracle files to every news outlet on earth.”
Kai went still. “The files that prove he killed government officials?”
“The ones that’ll bury him,” I said. “He’ll come. Because he can’t resist a stage.”
My mother shook her head. “It’s a trap within a trap, Elena. He’ll bring her but he’ll also bring the Cradle’s neural trigger. One wrong move, and he’ll activate it remotely.”
“Then we make sure there are no wrong moves,” I said. “Daniel, I need you to hack the Cove’s old security system reactivate the hidden cameras. Viktor, secure the perimeter. Kai…”
I turned to him. “You stay with me. No matter what he says. No matter what he shows you.”
He stepped close, voice low. “He could show me a thousand lies. I’d still know your truth.”
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
I sat on the edge of the bed, watching Liora’s photo, and whispered the lullaby again softly, like a promise.
From the doorway, Kai said, “She’ll know your voice when she hears it.”
“How?” I asked.
“Because it’s the first thing she ever heard,” he said. “The day she was born. You sang to her in the hospital. Before he took her.”
Tears filled my eyes. “You were there?”
“I held her,” he said, voice breaking. “For three minutes. Then they said you’d lost too much blood… and I had to leave to protect you from the men coming to silence us both.”
He sat beside me. “I named her Liora. ‘My light.’ Because even then, I knew she’d be the reason we’d find our way back.”
I leaned into him. “Then we’ll bring her home.”
But as dawn broke, a new alert flashed on Daniel’s screen.
A live feed from Blackwater Cove.
Silas stood on the mansion’s balcony Liora in his arms.
And in her small hand…
she held a red rose.
Just like the one from the boathouse.
Just like the one from our cover.
My blood ran cold.
Because that rose wasn’t there yesterday.
Which meant
she’d been watching us all along.
- Writer
