Chapter 5 - THE WOMAN WHO VANISHED
Serena was arrested before sunrise.
She did not cry as officers placed her in handcuffs. She looked past Victor toward Lily’s room.
“This isn’t over,” she said. “Ask your precious nanny what happened to Rosa.”
Lily went cold.
Rosa Delgado had been Ethan’s first nanny. She had left the Blackwood mansion eight months earlier without saying goodbye. Staff were told her mother was sick in Arizona.
Lily had never believed it.
“She sent me one message,” Lily told Detective Quinn. “It said, ‘Don’t trust the medicine.’ Then her number stopped working.”
Quinn opened a missing-person search immediately.
Victor returned to the mansion with Marco and found Warren Price’s office stripped. File drawers stood open. A hard drive had been removed from the computer. The safe was empty except for one photograph.
It showed Serena, Warren, and Rosa outside a small clinic in Indiana.
On the back, someone had written: HE SAW THE TEST RESULTS.
“Who is he?” Marco asked.
Victor turned the photograph over again. “I don’t know.”
A search of Julian’s apartment produced burner phones, forged medical forms, and copies of Victor’s travel schedule. It also produced a train ticket purchased for Rosa under a false name.
The destination was Milwaukee.
Detective Quinn located a woman matching Rosa’s description working nights at a roadside motel. By noon, officers were on their way.
But someone reached her first.
The motel manager found Rosa’s room open, the mattress overturned, and a message written across the mirror in red lipstick:
THE NANNY TALKS, THE BABY PAYS.
Victor read the photograph Quinn sent him and felt the old violence rise in his chest.
Marco saw it. “Say the word.”
Victor looked toward the hospital, where Ethan slept with his arm in a soft cast and Lily sat beside him.
“No,” Victor said. “We do this legally.”
Quinn called one minute later.
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“We found blood in Rosa’s room,” she said. “And the security footage shows who took her.”
The driver was Victor’s younger brother, Damien Blackwood.
