As soon as I park the car, Elia is hopping out to get Danny out of the car seat. My home office phone rings. I unlock the door and sprint inside, running into my office and picking it up before it stops.

"Hello?"

"Good news, Jeff." I can hear the smile in my lawyer's voice. "They filed a motion to dismiss their claim. I guess they heard about your wedding."

"Thank you," I say. I sink into my ergonomic office chair. "What a relief."

"Sure," my lawyer says. "Congratulations. I won't oppose the motion and we'll get this done. You have a nice day, now."

The phone buzzes. A weight I didn't even know was pressing on my shoulders is lifted. I run outside so that I can tell Elia the good news.

"No!" she screams. I ditch the phone right there and then and run out to the front to see something out of my worst nightmares.

Elia has just lost the battle for Danny. Danny is screaming his lungs out, trying to squirm back to Elia, but there is a squad of men extracting the baby from my front lawn. I run towards them at full speed, but they're running to a van at the end of our driveway at an easy lope that's somehow at least fifty percent faster than my own sprint. As soon as the last one is in, the car is moving even though the door isn't shut. Those guys are professionals.

"Jeff!" Elia screams. When she begins to run, I catch her hand. "We have to go after them! We have to save Danny!" She's crying, snot dripping from her little nose. I kiss her cheek. "We'll save Danny. Don't worry. I know who it is."

"But what if they're going to hold him for ransom?" she sobs, burying her face in my chest. "I can't bear the idea of something bad happening to our little boy."

I kiss her temple. "They're not trying to hurt him. It's not going to be a conventional ransom demand."

"What do you mean?" she asks, leaning away from my chest. Her eyes are still full of tears. 

"It's his grandparents," I tell her. "Danny is going to be fine." "Possession is nine tenths of the law." She steps back from me. 

"It isn't, actually, but they just dismissed the case that they had to get custody legally."

"So they decided to kidnap him?"

"This whole thing is about money," I tell Elia. "Danny won't be physically harmed, but they're going to try to get financial custodianship of his inheritance anyway."

"It'll be under duress. You're being coerced."

"I know," I say. "They must be desperate. I need to look into their current financial situation."

***

Two hours later, I have a short answer and it's not pretty. I sit back and sigh.

"What did your investigator find?"

"My former in-laws are up to their necks in debt. I had no idea, but my dead wife had been regularly slipping them money that we could easily spare to keep them afloat. She didn't talk to me about it at all. And when she died, they lost their gravy train."

"That's terrible." Elia touches my hand, trying to comfort me even though both of us are still devastated by the sudden kidnapping of our baby.

I swear and use an expletive that I can't use around my infant son. "If she'd told me about it, I probably would've kept up the payments. It wasn't as if I wanted to see my son's grandparents on the street. They had always had a mountain of debt behind them. They'd raised my dead wife as a princess without having the money to do so. They'd borrowed themselves into a hole that was hard to get out of."

"Then she married you..."

"I wasn't a billionaire when we got married. It's mostly paper wealth, as you know. But I've always trusted...well, I always used to trust her. I knew that she liked to spend a lot but had no idea she was a lifeline for her parents."

"My primary concern is Danny," Elia says. "I want him back."

"So do I. I'm not sure if we should call the police or not." "They abducted our son. I think that merits a call to the police."

"He's not being hurt. They haven't presented a demand yet."

"Still," she says. "I don't want to wait around for them to get in contact with us. Let's be proactive."

I look at her and then call the police on my cell phone.

"Not an emergency, but my son has been kidnapped," I tell the dispatcher.

"Please hold," she tells me. In a few minutes, there's a sympathetic officer listening to what I have to say.

"And when did this happen?"

"Two hours ago."

"And they haven't returned your son, Danny?"

"Correct." My voice breaks on that one word. They stole the sun out of the sky.

"Do you have their home address?" the officer asks.

"Yes." "So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to ask you to give an official statement at the police station. Then I'm going to their home to see what I can see. You said that they dismissed the case against you?" "Yes."

"Okay. Here's the address of the station. The sooner you get here, the sooner we can get started."

"See you soon."

I hang up the phone, go to my car, key in the address, and motion for Elia to hop in.

"We're going to make a statement and she's going to get our baby back."

Elia scrambles into my car and barely buckles her seatbelt before we go tearing out of the driveway. The car seat in my car feels incredibly empty.

I feel like I've failed my son by letting him be abducted. It wasn't as if we'd let him out of our sight. Elia was holding him when that team of men literally pulled him out of her arms. I didn't know what kind of men would tear a baby from his mother's arms, but they obviously had.

I have a military background. Women and children are off limits. Always. But those guys apparently didn't have a moral compass or could shut it off for enough money. The funny part was that my in-laws didn't have the money to pay them, so I didn't know what exactly they were working for.