Chapter 8 - inside the rusted cage)
Blackwood House was dark when they arrived. The front doors stood open, and the family portraits had been removed from the foyer. Marcus was emptying the house.
He led Emily through the service corridor with one hand locked around her arm. The linen shelves were gone. Behind them, the passage descended into a basement transformed since dawn.
The filing cabinets had vanished. So had the office walls. Only the furnace remained, roaring beside a rectangular cage bolted to the floor.
“Get inside,” Marcus said.
Emily stared at the rusted bars. “You promised to show me Anna.”
“After you sign.”
“Bring her here.”
His fingers tightened. “Inside.”
She stepped into the cage. Marcus closed the door and snapped a heavy padlock through the latch. The sound traveled through Emily’s bones.
He placed a document on a metal table just beyond the bars. It transferred the trust and permanent custody of the unborn child to a foundation Marcus controlled.
“How do I sign from here?” she asked.
“When you’re ready, I’ll open the door.”
“Then open it.”
“First, give me the camera.”
Emily kept her face still.
Marcus tapped the front of his shirt where a body camera would rest. “Voss saw Holt give it to you.”
The smile at the rescue station had not been triumph. Voss had been signaling that his own camera captured the handoff.
Emily removed Holt’s camera from beneath her coat and slid it through the bars. Marcus smashed it beneath his heel.
The red light died.
He searched her coat, took her phone, and found Patel’s syringe in the sleeve. He held it up with an almost admiring expression.
“What were you going to do? Drug me and carry your sister home?”
“I hadn’t worked out the carrying part.”
Marcus struck the bars beside her face. Emily flinched but did not step back.
“You think jokes make you brave,” he said. “They only make this take longer.”
“Where is Anna?”
He set a small phone against the table leg. Its screen displayed four live video feeds. One showed a white room with an empty chair. One showed a tiled chamber filling slowly with water. In the third, Lena Ortiz lay beneath a red blanket. The fourth was dark.
“Choose,” Marcus said.
“Choose what?”
“Which one I save after you sign.”
Emily looked from the screen to his face. “You said Anna was alive.”
“She is. For now.”
“Which room?”
“Sign.”
He pushed a clipboard between the bars.
Emily took it and read every line. Marcus paced beside the furnace. He was losing time. Somewhere above them, movers or accomplices carried evidence from the house. Somewhere beyond the walls, Anna and Lena waited.
Holt had said Marcus feared witnesses he could not buy.
Emily needed to keep him talking.
“Why did you choose Anna?” she asked.
Marcus stopped pacing.
“I didn’t.”
“Then who did?”
“Your sister walked into Harbor House asking questions about missing women. She photographed a vehicle. The wrong people noticed.”
“What people?”
He looked at the phone screen. “People who make Voss look honest.”
“You worked for them.”
“I kept Anna off their transport list. I brought her food. I moved her when they ordered her killed.”
“You expect gratitude?”
“I expect you to understand that I am the only reason either of you is alive.”
The baby shifted low in Emily’s body. Pain gathered along her spine.
“You married me because of her.”
“At first.”
The answer was quieter than the others.
Emily hated the part of herself that heard something human in it.
“And later?”
Marcus came closer to the bars. “Later, I thought I could build a life above what was buried here.”
“By putting me in the same basement?”
His face hardened. “You wouldn’t stop digging.”
The contraction struck. Emily folded forward, gripping the bars. Marcus waited without helping. When it passed, she felt the hidden phone slide against her thigh.
Ruth had placed it inside the pocket sewn into the support band at the hospital. It was smaller than her palm, with one button already pressed. Its line remained open to Holt’s private number. Whether Holt still possessed that phone, she did not know.
“You’re never leaving here,” Marcus said.
He kicked the cage. Steel rang around her.
Emily cried out, partly from fear and partly because the second contraction came too soon.
Marcus crouched beside the bars. “Sign, or your child will be born beside your sister’s body.”
Emily slipped one hand beneath her dress and closed it around the hidden phone.
Footsteps moved faintly overhead.
Not movers. Too careful.
May you like
Marcus heard them too. He stood, pulled a remote control from his pocket, and pressed a button. On the small phone beside the table, a ten-minute countdown appeared over Lena’s video.
Then the basement door exploded inward.
