Chapter 3

Nathaniel Sinclair.

I stared at it for a full minute, waiting for the app to correct itself.

Everyone knows that name. It's painted on the tails of half the cargo planes in the sky. Sinclair Global — aviation, logistics, private security, eleven thousand aircraft, ports on four continents, a privately held empire worth more than some countries.

Parent/Child match: 99.99%.

It had to be a glitch. A contaminated sample. A scam. Billionaires do not turn up as the biological father of a foster kid from Dayton who aged out with two garbage bags and a name pinned to her blanket.

I googled him with numb fingers, and the third result stopped my heart.

THE SINCLAIR BABY: 28 YEARS LATER, THE SEARCH GOES ON

In 1997, eight-month-old Wren Sinclair was taken from the family estate by a nanny later found dead. The child was never recovered. Nathaniel Sinclair maintains a $25 million standing reward and personally funds the Beacon Registry, the largest missing-children DNA database in the world. "I will look for my daughter until the day I die," he said in 2021. "After that, my money will keep looking."

Wren.

My file said I'd been left at a church in Dayton with no documents. Just a blanket, and a strip of masking tape, and one word.

Wren.

I dropped the phone.

I want to tell you I handled it with grace. I sat on my kitchen floor and came apart at the seams — because for twenty-eight years I had been nobody, and being nobody is exactly what let Damon Cole carve me up for a decade, and now—

The phone rang. Unknown number.

I answered without speaking.

"Hello?" A man's voice. Older. Careful, like he was carrying something made of glass. "Is this — I'm sorry. The registry flagged a match this morning, and I've made this call four hundred times in twenty-eight years and it has never once been real, so forgive me if I—"

He stopped. Took a breath that shook.

"My name is Nathaniel Sinclair. Twenty-eight years ago someone took my daughter. She had a birthmark on the inside of her left wrist. Shaped like a little heart, about the size of a dime."

My thumb went to the mark my foster mother used to call my wishbone, and a sound came out of me that I didn't recognize.

"It's there," he whispered. He was crying. This man owns eleven thousand aircraft and he was sobbing into a phone. "Oh, God. It's there, isn't it. Where are you? Tell me where you are and I'll be there before dark. Tell me you're safe. Tell me you're—"

"I'm not safe," I said. "And neither is your granddaughter."

Silence.

Then his voice changed. The tears stayed in it, but underneath, something turned to steel.

"My granddaughter."

"Her name is Poppy. She's five. She's a Type 1 diabetic, and last night my husband took her out of the country on a private charter with about two days of insulin, and the family court judge who signed the order is the grandfather of his other child, and when I called the FBI they told me it was a civil matter—" my voice broke in half. "She has thirty-six hours, maybe forty. And I don't know what ocean she's under."

I heard movement on his end. Doors. Voices. A man giving orders with the phone still against his face: wake the flight crew — get Ashford, I don't care what time it is where he is — get me Legal and get me Ops, twenty minutes.

Then he came back to me, and his voice was very quiet and very calm, and it was the most frightening calm I have ever heard.

"Wren. Sweetheart. I need you to understand two things."

"Okay," I whispered.

"The first is that nobody is ever touching you or that little girl again. Not ever."

"And the second?"

A pause. Paper rustling.

"There are four private charter operators at that airfield. Three of them lease their aircraft from a subsidiary of Sinclair Aviation." His voice dropped into something made of ice. "Your husband ran, Wren. He ran in one of my planes."

I couldn't breathe.

"I have the flight plan," my father said. "I have the tail number. I have the tarmac footage of my granddaughter walking up those stairs."

"You—"