Chapter 1 - Six Words in the Snow
“PLEASE DON'T LET THEM FIND ME! IF THEY KNOW I'M STILL ALIVE, THEY'LL COME BACK!”
“Who is coming, sweetheart? Tell me who you're afraid of.”
“The man... the man smiling beside you in that picture.”
Those words would change my life forever.
My name is Michael Bennett. I'm forty-two years old, and for nearly two decades, I've controlled one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the city.
Men who had killed without hesitation lowered their eyes when I entered a room.
Politicians returned my telephone calls.
Business executives pretended not to recognize me in public, then begged for my financial assistance behind closed doors.
I owned hotels, transportation companies, construction firms, and enough legitimate businesses to make people forget where my fortune had originally come from.
People called me the most dangerous man in the city.
But eleven years earlier, I had learned that all the power in the world meant absolutely nothing when the person you loved most was dying.
My daughter, Emily, had been nine years old.
She had golden-brown hair, an infectious laugh, and a habit of wrapping her tiny fingers around my shirt whenever she felt frightened.
I lost her on a snowy December night.
And something inside me died with her.
For eleven years, I avoided Old Ridge Road, the winding mountain highway where our lives had been destroyed.
Until the night a blizzard forced me back.
I had just left a charity gala benefiting St. Catherine's Hospital. A photograph of me smiling beside hospital executives lay on the passenger seat of my black SUV.
The photograph made me sick.
I had donated two million dollars to help sick children.
Yet I would have sacrificed every dollar I possessed to spend another five minutes with Emily.
Snow hammered my windshield as I navigated the narrow mountain road.
The temperature had dropped below zero.
Suddenly, my headlights caught something near the guardrail.
Something small.
Something pale.
A child's hand protruding from the snow.
“Dear God.”
I slammed on the brakes.
My SUV skidded sideways before stopping.
I jumped out into the freezing darkness and struggled through knee-deep snow.
Then I saw her.
A little girl, no older than eight, lying motionless beside the guardrail.
Her thin winter jacket was soaked. Her sneakers were frozen, and her lips had turned blue.
I dropped beside her.
“Sweetheart! Can you hear me?”
No answer.
I touched her neck.
For one horrible second, I felt nothing.
Then a faint pulse fluttered beneath my fingers.
“Stay with me, baby. Please.”
I tore off my expensive wool coat and wrapped it around her.
When I lifted her into my arms, her fingers moved weakly against my chest.
They caught my shirt.
Just as Emily used to do.
My breath caught in my throat.
Eleven years disappeared.
For one devastating moment, I could almost imagine that I was holding my daughter again.
“I've got you,” I whispered. “You're not alone.”
I carried her into the SUV, turned the heater up, and called 911.
“This is Michael Bennett. I found a dying child on Old Ridge Road. I'm taking her to St. Catherine's. Tell them to prepare for a severe hypothermia case.”
The dispatcher recognized my name.
Her voice changed immediately.
I barely heard her instructions.
The little girl was struggling to breathe.
I drove through the storm, speaking to her constantly.
“Come on, sweetheart. Open your eyes for me.”
Eventually, her eyelashes fluttered.
Two frightened gray eyes stared up at me.
“That's it,” I whispered. “You're doing great.”
But instead of relaxing, she looked toward the dark windows.
Her expression became one of absolute terror.
Then her hand suddenly seized my shirt.
“Please don't let them find me.”
My stomach tightened.
“Who, sweetheart?”
She struggled to breathe.
“If they know I'm alive, they'll come back.”
I glanced toward the deserted road behind us.
Nothing but darkness and snow.
“Who left you out there?”
Her trembling finger pointed toward the passenger-side floor.
My charity gala photograph had fallen beside her frozen sneakers.
She stared at it.
Then she pointed to the smiling man standing beside me.
“That man,” she whispered. “He told them I wasn't supposed to come home.”
I looked at the photograph.
My own face smiled back at me.
Standing beside me was Julian Mercer, chairman of St. Catherine's charitable foundation and one of the most respected philanthropists in the state.
A man who had shaken my hand less than an hour earlier.
A man who had thanked me for helping vulnerable children.
And now an eight-year-old girl was accusing him of leaving her to die.
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel.
Because if she was telling the truth, the man responsible wasn't hiding somewhere in the criminal underworld.
May you like
He was standing in the brightest spotlights of respectable society.
And I had just handed him two million dollars.
