MY GRANDMOTHER GAVE ME $500 FOR CHRISTMAS. THEN SHE LOOKED AT MY MOTHER AND SAID FIVE WORDS THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING.

The storm peaked as we hit the jagged headland of Cape Elizabeth. The Atlantic Ocean was a churning, black abyss below the hundred-foot granite cliffs, throwing freezing spray fifty feet into the air. Through the driving sleet, the silhouette of the deactivated 19th-century lighthouse rose like a jagged tooth against the storm-tossed sky.

Blackwood’s limousine sat abandoned at the base of the tower, its doors thrown wide open to the gale, engine dead.

Julian killed our truck’s headlights and pulled up directly behind it.

"Ruth, you stay in the cab with the heat on," Clara commanded, her voice leaving no room for argument.

"No," Ruth rasped, clutching Clara’s wrist with surprising strength. Her eyes were sunken, dark with decades of buried agony. "Victor will only negotiate with me. Maeve is my daughter, Clara. I put that gun in her hand forty years ago. I have to be the one to face her."

Clara looked at her mother for five long seconds. The anger that had lived between them for half a century seemed to fracture, replaced by a terrible, shared sorrow. Clara nodded once. "Then we go together."

We kicked through the rusted iron door at the base of the lighthouse tower.

Inside, a cast-iron spiral staircase corkscrewed endlessly upward into the darkness, lit only by the cold, sweeping flashes of emergency beacons mounted on the exterior railing. Water dripped down the brick walls, smelling of salt, rust, and decades of rot.

*Clang. Clang. Clang.*

Heavy footsteps echoed from fifty feet above us.

"Julian," a voice called down from the iron spiral. It was Maeve. Her tone was taut, trembling slightly beneath the veneer of corporate arrogance. "You shouldn't have followed us. Victor has two snipers on the catwalk. The moment you step into the lantern room, you're dead."

"Maeve, listen to me!" Julian shouted, taking the stairs two at a time, keeping his body low against the central iron column. "Blackwood used you! He didn't raise you to be his daughter; he raised you to be his scapegoat! The moment the feds crack the offshore trusts, your name is on every corporate filing, not his!"

"Lies!" Maeve’s voice cracked from above. "He gave me everything!"

A burst of automatic gunfire rained down from the iron grate above our heads. Julian shoved me flat against the curved brick wall as iron ricochets sparked inches from my boots. Clara raised the shotgun and fired upward through the open metal grating. A muffled scream echoed down, followed by the heavy thud of a rifle clattering down the spiral stairs, bouncing violently off the iron steps before splashing into the flooded basement pool below.

One guard down.

We pushed upward, step by step, our thighs burning, lungs screaming for oxygen in the damp, freezing air. At the ninety-foot landing, we stepped out onto the rusted platform directly beneath the giant glass lantern room.

A blood-chilling wind tore through the broken glass panes. Standing at the edge of the circular iron balcony, silhouetted against the roaring Atlantic surf, was Victor Blackwood.