HER SISTER-IN-LAW PUSHED HER PREGNANT BODY—STILL STRAPPED TO A WHEELCHAIR—INTO A DEEP POOL! BUT WHEN A BRAVE WOMAN JUMPED IN TO SAVE HER, THE SISTER-IN-LAW DID SOMETHING EVEN MORE SHOCKING...

"Maya!" Clara yelled, lunging forward, but Julian grabbed her arm, holding her back from the edge.

Maya’s eyes were wide with terror. Her clothes were soaked, her face bruised from a severe struggle. She was strapped to the floor of the heavy steel cage, and beneath her feet, the black lake water was already rising through the iron floorboards as the winch slowly lowered the cage inch by inch.

"She thought she was so clever," Victoria smiled, tapping the metal railing with her gun barrel. "Tracking my offshore financial wires through Zurich. She walked right into my extraction team at the marina this morning. Loyalty is such a pathetic flaw, isn't it, Clara?"

"Let her go, Victoria!" Julian’s voice broke with raw fury. "Take me! Kill me if you want your revenge! Leave Clara and Maya out of this!"

"Oh, Julian... you're so predictably heroic," Victoria chuckled, her eyes gleaming with psychotic delight. "But that wouldn't hurt you enough. Dying is easy. Watching the person you love drown while you hold the power to save only one of them... that is poetry."

Victoria pointed her gun toward the two release levers on the industrial control panel at the opposite ends of the platform.

"The winch is set on an automated timer," Victoria explained, her voice as smooth as silk. "In two minutes, the cage submerges completely into twenty feet of freezing water. Lever A stops the winch and pulls Maya to safety. But pulling Lever A releases the lock on the overhead fuel reservoir—dumping two thousand gallons of aviation fuel over Clara’s platform and igniting it instantly."

Clara’s heart stopped. She looked up. Directly above her hung a massive, rusted fuel tank with electronic release valves blinking red.

"And Lever B?" Julian asked, his voice trembling with a rage so violent his gun shook.

"Lever B dumps the fuel harmlessly into the lake and opens the exit doors for you and Clara," Victoria whispered, leaning forward, her face twisted in demonic ecstasy. "But it cuts the chain to Maya’s cage. She sinks to the bottom of Lake Geneva in three hundred pounds of steel. You have ninety seconds, brother. Save your wife... or save the woman who saved your son’s life."

"You monster!" Clara screamed.