Room 314
Chapter 03 - Room 314
Lily had climbed into the sedan because she believed Vanessa was taking the stolen papers. When the car began moving, she hid beneath a blanket in the back seat. Now she was trapped with two people who knew their plan had failed.
Ethan kept his voice calm while Detective Bennett traced the call. “Stay quiet, sweetheart. Tell me what you can see.”
Lily whispered that they had entered a building with a broken blue sign. She heard an elevator ring three times and Vanessa arguing that Caleb had promised no one would be hurt.
The signal ended.
Police raced toward the abandoned Hawthorne Hotel. Ethan rode with Bennett, blaming himself for letting Lily become involved. Margaret reminded him that Lily had acted because adults had been hiding the truth around her. Fear had not made the child careless; it had made her determined.
Room 314 was on the third floor, at the end of a corridor filled with dust and torn wallpaper. When officers forced the door open, they found a laptop connected to Ethan’s transfer key, the missing proxy page, and Vanessa’s silver wedding shoes.
Lily was not there.
A live security feed on the laptop showed Caleb leading her and Vanessa through the hotel basement toward an underground loading tunnel. Vanessa was crying. She had discovered that Caleb never intended to share the stolen company shares. Once the proxy was accepted, he planned to leave the country and frame her as the sole organizer.
The laptop displayed seven minutes until the transfer became final.
Rachel connected remotely and tried to cancel it, but Caleb had changed the authorization code. Only Ethan’s biometric confirmation could reverse the transaction, and the scanner attached to the laptop had been removed.
On the desk, Lily had left her pearl bracelet arranged in the shape of an arrow pointing toward a service elevator.
Ethan and Bennett followed it downstairs.
In the tunnel, Caleb held Lily by the arm and carried the portable scanner in his other hand. Vanessa stood between him and the exit, refusing to move.
“She’s a child,” Vanessa said. “Let her go.”
“You brought her into this family,” Caleb replied. “Now she is the only reason Ethan will give me what I need.”
Ethan stepped from behind a concrete pillar.
Caleb pressed the scanner against Lily’s wrist and smiled.
May you like
“Your fingerprint opens the company’s family vault,” he said. “But her identity closes it forever.”
A timer on the device began counting down from sixty seconds.
