Chapter 6 - The Hunt
The next twelve hours were the longest of my life.
Jonathan’s security team—former Special Forces, every last one of them—swept the estate from top to bottom, room by room, closet by closet, tree by tree. They used thermal imaging cameras. They brought in tracking dogs. They drained the pond. They searched every outbuilding, every crawl space, every spot a human being could possibly hide.
They found nothing.
Victoria was gone. Vanished into the Texas night like smoke. But she had left her calling card: the message in the stable, the photo of Grace, Cinnamon the pony stolen from her stall. It was a deliberate, calculated taunt. She wanted us to know she could get to us whenever she wanted. She wanted us looking over our shoulders, jumping at every shadow, too afraid to sleep.
By 6:00 a.m., the police were there. The DA. The SWAT team that had been supposed to arrest Victoria at her Westlake estate. They swarmed the property, taking statements, photographing the stable, dusting for prints. The head of the investigation—Detective Alvarez, a tough, no-nonsense woman with a scar across her left cheek—pulled Jonathan and me aside after the initial walkthrough.
“We have APBs out statewide,” she said, flipping through her notebook. “Airports, borders, bus stations—all flagged. Her car was found abandoned at a rest stop on I-35, burned to the ground. No body inside, which means she planned the switch. She’s got resources. Fake IDs. Cash. Friends in high places who owe her favors. She could be anywhere by now.”
She tapped the photo of Grace that had been pinned to the wall. “But this tells me she’s not leaving the state. Not yet. This is personal. She’s not running from you, Mrs. Ramirez. She’s hunting you. And the photo—she took it yesterday afternoon, between 3:00 and 4:00, judging by the shadow length. That means she was on this property for at least an hour, maybe longer, while your security was doing their regular patrols. She knows your routines. She knows the blind spots. She’s been watching you for weeks.”
A chill ran down my spine. Weeks. She had been in my home, watching my children play, while I slept, while I ate, while I thought we were finally safe.
Detective Alvarez looked at Jonathan. “My recommendation? You move the family. Somewhere she can’t find you. A safe house. Out of state. Until we pick her up.”
Jonathan shook his head immediately. “No. This is my home. I’m not running. And moving them makes them more vulnerable—she’ll hit us on the road, where we don’t have walls or security or cameras. We stay. We harden the perimeter. More men. More cameras. Dogs on patrol twenty-four seven. No one gets in or out without being searched twice. She wants a siege? Fine. We give her one. But inside these walls, we hold the line.”
Alvarez studied him for a long moment, then nodded. “Suit yourself. But I’m posting two uniformed officers at the gate around the clock. And if she contacts you—any contact, no matter how trivial—you call me immediately. Day or night. This woman is a sociopath, Mr. Mercer. She has already killed three people that we know of—Matthew, Pritchard, Dolores. She won’t hesitate to kill the girls, or you, or anyone else who gets in her way.”
She left, and the estate descended into a state of high alert. Iron gates were reinforced. Bulletproof glass was installed in the girls’ wing overnight. Armed guards patrolled every inch of the perimeter. The girls were told they could no longer play outside alone, not even in the backyard. Grace took it the hardest—she was old enough to understand that someone wanted to hurt us, old enough to feel the fear that hung in the air like smoke.
That night, after the girls were asleep—with two guards stationed directly outside their door—I found Jonathan in the library, staring at the whiteboard covered in Victoria’s web of lies. He looked exhausted. His shirt was unbuttoned, his tie loose, his hair messy from running his hands through it all day.
“You should sleep,” I said quietly, coming to stand beside him.
He didn’t look at me. “I can’t. Every time I close my eyes, I see that photo of Grace. I see her in the stable. And I think—what if we’d been five minutes later? What if she’d taken them while we were at the DA’s office? I promised I’d protect them, Elena. And I almost failed.”
I reached out and touched his arm. “You didn’t fail. We’re all here. We’re all safe. Victoria is the one running. We’re the ones with the proof. She’s desperate, Jonathan. That’s why she’s doing this. Desperate people make mistakes.”
He turned to look at me then, and in his eyes, I saw something I had never seen before—not anger, not determination, but something softer. Something vulnerable.
“I love them, you know,” he whispered. “Grace, Mia, Lily. They’re not just… a responsibility to me anymore. I love their laughter. I love the way Grace always has a book in her hand, the way Mia sings off-key in the shower, the way Lily still calls me ‘Mr. J’ even though I’ve told her a hundred times to call me Jonathan. They’ve become the best part of my life. And you… Elena, you’re the strongest, bravest woman I have ever known. You survived six years of hell and you still get up every morning and fight for those girls. You make me want to be better.”
He reached up and brushed a strand of hair from my face, his fingers lingering on my cheek. The air between us crackled with something that had been building for weeks—something that had started as gratitude and grown into respect and now, finally, into something more.
“I love you,” he said, so quiet I almost didn’t hear it. “I love all four of you. And I will burn the whole state of Texas to the ground before I let Victoria take any of you from me.”
He leaned down. His lips were soft against mine, gentle at first, then deeper, as if he was trying to pour every ounce of fear and hope and love he felt into that one kiss. I kissed him back, my arms winding around his neck, letting myself feel it—letting myself believe that maybe, after everything, we could have this. That we could have happiness.
The moment was shattered by the sharp, piercing ring of the phone on the desk.
Jonathan pulled back, his jaw tightening. He looked at the caller ID. Blocked.
He answered, putting it on speaker. “Mercer.”
Victoria’s voice came through, cold and amused, sounding like she was sitting right there in the room with us.
“Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan,” she purred. “Always the white knight. Always trying to save the poor, helpless maiden. Tell me—does she kiss as good as she cries? I always did love to watch her cry.”
My blood turned to ice. Jonathan’s hand clenched into a fist on the desk. “Where are you, Victoria?”
She laughed—a high, tinkling sound that made my skin crawl. “Oh, I’m everywhere, darling. I’m in the trees. I’m in the walls. I’m watching you right now, in fact. You look tired, Jonathan. All that worry about my granddaughters. It’s aging you.”
A pause. Then her voice dropped, losing its amusement, turning hard as steel.
“Let’s make a deal, the three of us. You have something I want—the recording. I have something you want. Well… two somethings, actually. Cinnamon the pony is perfectly safe, by the way. She’s in a lovely little stable in Weatherford. But the second thing? Oh, you’re going to want to sit down for this.”
She paused for dramatic effect. I grabbed Jonathan’s arm, my nails digging into his skin. What had she done?
“Remember that nice social worker, Linda? From the visitation center?” Victoria went on, her voice dripping with fake sympathy. “Such a good woman. Dedicated to the children. Well… she was driving home from a late dinner about an hour ago. Someone ran her off the road. Rolled her car three times into a ditch. They pulled her out alive… but just barely. The doctors say she’ll never walk again. And she’ll never work with children again. Shame, isn’t it? All because she decided to write down things that weren’t her business.”
The room spun. Linda. The woman who had protected my girls, who had found the locket, who had stood up for us in court. Broken. Permanently. Because of us.
“Now here’s the deal,” Victoria said, her voice brisk, all business now. “Tomorrow at noon, you will bring the recording—the original, no copies—to the old abandoned cotton gin on Route 84, outside of town. You will come alone, Jonathan. No police. No security. Just you, the recording, and Elena. You will hand it over. And in exchange… I will give you the location of the safe house where I am keeping Grace’s new best friend, Emily.”
Emily. Grace’s best friend from school. The ten-year-old who had welcomed Mia on her first day, who had come over for two sleepovers already, who was like a fourth daughter to me.
My heart stopped.
“You took Emily?” I screamed into the phone. “She’s a child! She has nothing to do with this!”
“On the contrary, my dear,” Victoria replied sweetly. “She has everything to do with this. She’s the leverage. You bring me that recording tomorrow at noon, and Emily walks out of that cotton gin without a scratch on her. You don’t… or you bring the police… or you try to trick me in any way… and I will send you pieces of her in the mail. Starting with her fingers. Then her toes. Then that pretty little head of hers. Do we understand each other?”
Silence. Jonathan and I stared at each other, the horror of what she was saying sinking in. She had taken an innocent child. A little girl who trusted us, who loved my daughters, who had done absolutely nothing wrong. And she was going to kill her if we didn’t give her the only proof we had that she was a murderer.
If we handed over the recording, Victoria walked free. She would disappear. She would keep coming for us. She would never stop. And she would get away with killing Matthew, Dolores, and maiming Linda.
If we didn’t hand it over… Emily died.
“Twelve hours, Jonathan,” Victoria said, her voice like a blade. “Noon tomorrow. Cotton gin. Alone. And remember—I’m watching. I always know. One wrong move, and the little girl dies. Slowly. Painfully. And it will be all your fault.”
The line went dead.
I collapsed onto the couch, my body shaking uncontrollably. Emily. Sweet, bubbly Emily, who loved unicorns and soccer and always shared her cookies. She was going to die because of us. Because Victoria wanted her recording back.
Jonathan was already moving, grabbing his phone, barking orders to Finch and Alvarez. But I barely heard him. I was trapped in a nightmare with no way out. A Sophie’s choice from hell.
Give up justice to save a child. Or sacrifice a child to get justice.
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There was no right answer. There was only Victoria, laughing in the dark, holding all the cards.
And twelve hours to decide which of us she was going to destroy next.
