Chapter 1 - the door exploded)
The first thing Emily heard above her own screaming was the basement door tearing away from its frame.
Wood struck stone. A white beam cut through the cold darkness and swept across the furnace, the rusted pipes, and the cage in which she knelt. For one suspended second, the light caught Marcus beside the bars. His hand was still lifted from kicking the steel. His face, so handsome in every photograph hanging upstairs, had twisted into something naked and animal.
“Police! Don’t move!”
The officer came down the steps with both hands on his weapon. A small red light blinked on the body camera fixed to his uniform. Emily tried to call to him, but another contraction closed around her spine like a crushing fist. She bent forward, pressing one palm beneath the curve of her belly while the other clung to the hidden phone inside her torn dress.
Marcus recovered first.
“Officer, thank God,” he said, letting his raised hand fall slowly. “My wife is having some kind of breakdown. She locked herself in there.”
Even now, his voice sounded reasonable.
Even now, part of Emily almost believed him.
The officer’s flashlight moved to the padlock on the outside of the cage, then to the purple bruises around Emily’s wrists. It settled on the dirty beige dress pulled tight over her nine-month belly.
“Step away from the cage,” he ordered.
Marcus smiled with only one side of his mouth. “You don’t understand who I am.”
“I understand exactly where your hands are. Keep them where I can see them.”
Emily looked at the officer’s nameplate. HOLT. His face was lined, his eyes steady. Behind him, rain blew through the broken doorway and flashed silver in the beam of his light.
Marcus took one step backward. Then his gaze dropped to Emily’s fist.
He saw the phone.
Everything changed.
Marcus lunged toward the furnace, not toward the stairs. Officer Daniel Holt shouted. Emily curled around the phone as if it were her child. Marcus tore open a narrow metal panel beside the furnace and reached inside.
Holt slammed him against the wall before he could pull out whatever was hidden there. The basement filled with the scrape of shoes, Marcus’s furious curses, and the sharp click of handcuffs. A black object fell from the opening and skidded across the floor.
It was not a gun.
It was a second phone.
Its screen lit when it struck the concrete. Four live video windows appeared. Three showed empty rooms with cages identical to Emily’s. The fourth showed a woman lying motionless beneath a red blanket.
Holt saw it. Emily saw it.
Marcus stopped fighting.
“Radio for help,” Emily gasped. “Please. There are others.”
Holt dragged Marcus away from the panel, pressed the radio at his shoulder, and called for medical units, backup, and detectives. His voice was controlled until Emily cried out again. Then he looked at the water spreading beneath her knees.
“She’s in labor,” he said into the radio. “She’s locked in a cage and she’s in labor.”
Marcus laughed softly from the floor.
Emily stared at him through the bars. “What’s funny?”
He raised his head. Blood touched the corner of his lip, but satisfaction shone in his eyes.
“You think he found you,” Marcus said. “He didn’t. I let him.”
Holt seized the fallen phone and turned the screen toward himself. The fourth video window had gone black. In the upper corner, a countdown appeared.
Nine minutes. Fifty-nine seconds.
Nine minutes. Fifty-eight.
Holt’s eyes met Emily’s.
“Where is she?” he demanded.
Marcus leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.
“Ask my wife,” he said. “She’s the one who started this.”
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Eight months earlier, before the cage, before the locked basement and the hidden phone, Emily Vale had believed the worst secret in her marriage was that her husband no longer loved her.
She had been wrong.
