HER OWN GRANDMOTHER PUSHED HER OFF A SECOND-FLOOR BALCONY IN FRONT OF A CROWDED CONCERT HALL! HER FATHER CAUGHT HER JUST SECONDS BEFORE SHE HIT THE GROUND. BUT THE LITTLE GIRL'S NEXT WORDS EXPOSED A TERRIFYING FAMILY SECRET...

The storm raged around them like a living beast. Salt spray and rain whipped across the steel grating, making every footstep a dance with death.

Daniel slowly walked forward along the catwalk, his knuckles white around the handle of the fire axe. Thirty feet out over the raging Atlantic, Grace stood with her back to the railing. Her crimson dress was plastered against her body by the gale, looking like a shroud of fresh blood.

In her trembling hand, the arming light on the scuttling detonator glowed red.

"Stop right there, Daniel," Grace warned, her voice barely audible over the roaring surf below. "One press. Just one. And fifty tons of Semtex will tear the spine out of this rock. The helipad will slide straight into the ocean. Your little rescue team, your heroic detective... and Lily. All buried under two million tons of rock and water."

Daniel stopped five paces away. He slowly lowered the axe, letting the heavy steel head rest against the grating.

"The helicopter hasn't lifted off yet, has it?" Daniel said, his voice terrifyingly calm, deadened to all fear. "You're waiting. Because you know that if you press that button, you die too."

A bizarre, melancholic smile crossed Grace’s lips. She looked down at the dark, boiling sea beneath them.

"I died five years ago, Daniel. I died the day Victoria threw our daughter from that balcony. I died the moment I realized that no matter how brilliantly I played, the world would always look at her, not me."

Grace looked back up, her eyes wide, glistening with tears of pure, irreversible madness.

"Do you know what my mother whispered to me right before she dropped Lily?" Grace asked softly.

Daniel’s chest tightened. "What?"

"'She is better than you, Grace,'" Grace quoted, her voice a hollow, chilling rasp. "'She has your father's hands. She has your soul. And you are just an empty vessel.' That's what Victoria said. And she was right. Lily is everything I could never be."

"Then let her live!" Daniel pleaded, extending a hand forward into the rain. "If you truly believe that, Grace... give her the chance to live! Don't destroy her out of spite for a dead woman!"

"She can't live without the conductor, Daniel," Grace whispered. "A masterpiece must have a definitive finale."

Grace’s thumb hovered over the red trigger.

In that split second, the heavy steel door behind Daniel burst open.

"DADDY!"

Daniel whipped his head around. Lily had broken free from Miller. The little girl had sprinted out onto the freezing, wind-swept catwalk, her bare feet slipping on the wet steel, her white dress soaked through.

"Lily! NO! GO BACK!" Daniel roared in utter horror.

Grace saw her daughter. A flicker of genuine, human grief crossed Grace's deranged face—the last dying ember of a mother’s soul before the abyss consumed it completely.

"Goodbye, my melody," Grace whispered.

Her thumb pressed down on the detonator.

*CLICK.*

A low, subterranean rumble shook the volcanic rock to its core. A series of deafening explosions rippled through the lower foundations of the citadel. The steel pillars anchoring the catwalk sheared in two with a sound like tearing locomotives.

The entire gantry tilted violently toward the sea.

Grace lost her footing, slipping backward over the iron railing into the empty air. But as she fell, her hand shot out, her fingers locking with desperate, feral strength around the hem of Lily's dress.

"DADDY!" Lily shrieked as the force of Grace's falling weight dragged the little girl toward the edge of the collapsing platform.

"LILY!"

Daniel threw himself across the slick, tilting metal. He didn't think. He didn't hesitate. He lunged over the sheared edge of the catwalk into the open sky.

His left hand caught the iron railing just as it bent toward the abyss.

His right hand caught Lily’s small wrist.

And hanging directly below Lily, suspended by her death-grip on the seven-year-old’s silk hem, was Grace Sterling, dangling three hundred feet above the raging, shark-infested ocean.

"Daniel!" Grace looked up, her eyes wild, the ocean spray crashing against her legs below. "Help me! Don't let me fall!"

The strain was catastrophic. Daniel’s shoulder dislocated with a sickening *POP*. White-hot agony flared down his left arm as the torn muscles screamed under the combined weight of his daughter and his wife. The iron railing he was holding was groaning, the bolts tearing out of the concrete wall one by one.

*Pop... pop...*

The metal was giving way.

He couldn't hold both of them. He could barely hold his daughter.

"Daddy! My dress is ripping!" Lily screamed, tears streaming down her face as the silk fabric tore slowly along the seams. "Daddy, it hurts! It hurts!"

Grace looked up at Daniel. She saw the tearing fabric. She saw the bolts pulling free from the wall. And in that terrifying, final second of clarity, she knew.

"Daniel..." Grace choked out, the roar of the sea echoing in the darkness below. "Choose."

A bolt snapped. The railing dropped three inches. Daniel screamed in pure agony, his grip on Lily slipping by millimeters.