Chapter 3 - The Secret Line
It took eleven minutes to crawl the twenty feet from the living room floor to the master bath.
I didn't use my legs. My lower back was a sheet of screaming flame that turned my vision gray every time my hips shifted an inch. I pulled myself forward using my forearms, my fingernails digging into the grain of the white oak, leaving a dark, smeared trail behind me.
Inside the bathroom, I reached up and pulled down the heavy marble soap dispenser, sending it crashing into the porcelain sink.
Behind the mirror frame, hidden inside the recessed wall cavity behind the medicine cabinet, sat a black satchel that Julian didn't know existed.
Inside was a satellite phone—a heavy, ruggedized iridium unit with an encrypted chip that had been assigned to my mother’s family office in London forty years ago.
My fingers were slippery with sweat and blood as I flipped the antenna up and dialed the single ten-digit speed-dial number stored in its memory.
The line didn't ring. It hummed twice—a low, secure military tone.
"Speak," a voice said.
It wasn't my father. It was Marcus, the chief of security who had buried my grandfather forty years ago in Virginia.
"Marcus," I rasped, my throat raw from the dust on the floor. "It’s Katherine."
A three-second pause held on the line. I heard the faint rustle of heavy paper being set down, followed by the distinctive metallic click of a lighter closing.
"Where are you, Miss Katherine?" Marcus’s voice had dropped its casual tone instantly, turning flat, cold, and razor-sharp.
"Fifty-second floor. The Park Avenue penthouse."
"Is Vance with you?"
"No," I choked out, a fresh tear cutting a clean line through the dust on my cheek. "Julian took the cane from the study. He... he hit me twenty times, Marcus. He took Chloe to the Aspen jet."
Silence fell over the satellite line for five full seconds—a silence so dense it felt heavier than the pain in my back.
Then a second voice cut in from the extension speaker.
"Katherine."
It was my father. Vance Sterling.
"Father," I sobbed.
"Did he sign the deed transfer for the Hudson Yards parcel yet?" Vance asked. His tone wasn't angry. It wasn't shocked. It sounded like a judge reading a land survey from 1920.
"No," I whispered. "He... he said he’d make me sign it on Friday."
"Good," my father replied softly. "Hold the phone to your ear, darling. Do not call an ambulance. Marcus’s medical team is already on the service elevator."
"Father—"
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"Five minutes, Katherine," Vance said, his voice dropping into that terrifying, absolute stillness that had made three governors resign in the nineties. "Five minutes."
The line went dead.
