you to find Molly.” He cut through Kaede’s swift promise that he was on his way to help. “No. Just give me her location.” There was a tense silence as Kaede struggled against his urge to barrage Bas with a thousand questions and instead promised to text the location to the phone. Bas cut the connection, impatiently waiting for the coordinates to show up on the screen. Once they appeared, he hastily crossed the room to show them to Lana. “This is the GPS location.”
She pressed a button on the monitor, bringing up Valhalla’s blueprints. Then, skimming her finger over the screen, she at last pointed to a spot almost directly below them.
“Fifth floor, Section C, room two-fifty-five,” she murmured.
Wolfe moved to stand behind her shoulder, leaning forward to study the screen.
“A storage unit for the preschool,” he abruptly concluded.
Bas studied the Tagos’s stark profile. “Is there a camera?”
The older man shook his head. “No.”
Bas clenched his hands. “Shit.”
Lana slid her finger over the screen, calling up the complex schematics that revealed the building’s electrical grid.
She frowned as she traced a blue line to the storage room. “There’s an intercom.”
Bas wasn’t impressed. Dammit. His daughter was trapped with a female who’d already proven she was ruthless enough to lie, cheat, and steal to become leader of the Brotherhood.
Who the hell knew what she would do to a four-year-old child?
“How’s that going to help?” he challenged in bleak tones.
Lana turned, laying a comforting hand on his arm. “We’ll see if we can contact Molly. If she’s hiding I can lead her to a way out,” she said in soft tones. “If she’s with Stella, then we can try to negotiate for her release. Either way we’ll know if she’s okay.”
Bas forced himself to take a deep breath. It wasn’t the answer he wanted, but he would have to settle for at least assuring himself that Molly was unhurt.
He nodded his head at the monitor. “Can we do it from here?”
“No.” Lana shut down the screen. “We need to go to my office.”
Without waiting for his response, Lana headed toward the door, closely followed by her faithful Tagos.
Waiting until they’d disappeared, Bas turned to discover Myst staring blankly into space, as if she’d just been struck by a hideous thought.
Instinctively he moved forward to wrap his arms around her slender body, tugging her against his chest.
“We’re going to get her back,” he murmured in soothing tones.
She nodded even as she trembled from the intensity of her inner emotions.
“I trust you,” she assured him.
He pulled back to study her pale face with unconcealed surprise. This female had fought tooth and nail to keep him at a distance.
“Truly?”
She bit her bottom lip. “Yes.”
He ran a hand up and down her back, trying to ease her vicious distress. Christ. She felt like she was going to shatter into a million pieces.
“Then what’s bothering you?”
“This is my vision,” she breathed, her eyes dark with distress.
He stilled. Had she seen something new? Something that was even worse than the first one?
“What’s your vision?” he demanded.
She laid her hands on his chest, gripping the fabric of his robe.
“Don’t you see?” she rasped. “When I foresaw that I would create a weapon, I assumed it would be some dangerous new technology.”
He frowned, still confused by her nearly incoherent words. “You know what the weapon is?”
“Molly.”
Whatever he’d expected her to say, it certainly hadn’t been his daughter’s name.
“Molly?”
“Yes.”
His frown deepened. “Molly is the weapon?”
She licked her lips, her heart pounding loud enough that he could hear it in the thick silence that shrouded the room. Absently he realized he couldn’t sense anyone near. Obviously Lana had been serious when she said that Valhalla would be evacuated.
“Remember Boggs said the weapon had something to do with my blood?” she said, her voice so low he could barely catch the words. “I created Molly and it was the power that flows through her blood that turned Stella into a plague carrier.”
His lips parted to deny her claim. Molly wasn’t a weapon. She was a sweet, innocent child. But he couldn’t force the words to form.
Maybe she was right. Her vision had been of death and destruction spreading through Valhalla.
“God. Damn.”
* * *
Stella paced the storage room, her temper at the breaking point.
For the past half hour she’d desperately searched for a way out. Granted, she held a trump card in the child. But she wanted to know that she could escape if worse came to worst.
At last she’d been forced to concede