Family on Their Knees Heart Turned to Ice novel Chapter 1283

1283 /1384

"She vanished without a trace," Sebastian argued, his voice tight with frustration. "No credit card activity, no flight records, nothing. Whoever grabbed her has kept her entirely off the grid. Northwyn is a massive city. Flipping it upside down to find one woman isn't a weekend job."

Old Mr. Blake slammed his fist onto his mahogany desk. "If I had known you were this incompetent, I never would have handed her over to you! I gave you the authority to handle her out of respect for your position, and you let her slip through your fingers! Now she's missing, mutilated, and dragging us into a billion-dollar extortion plot!"

He paced the room, his voice echoing off the vaulted ceiling. "And this is just the beginning! Today it's a $1 billion debt and two fingers. Tomorrow it'll be a hand, a foot, or her miserable life! That worthless piece of trash should have just died in the gutter. Instead, she's bringing a catastrophe right to our front door!"

Whenever Debbie was mentioned, Old Mr. Blake lost all sense of decorum. If murder were legal, he would have strangled her with his bare hands a decade ago.

Sebastian felt the exact same revulsion. He despised the fact that her blood ran in his veins. He would have given anything to have been born an orphan rather than be tied to a parasite he could never truly scrape off.

Seeing the two men locked in a bitter standoff, Old Mrs. Blake finally intervened.

"Enough, both of you. Screaming about the past won't fix the present. We have a crisis to manage." She gestured vaguely toward the plastic bag Sebastian held. "Those fingers are dead tissue. They can't be reattached anyway. Sebastian, you..."