He didn’t speak. He just flicked the flame, holding it an inch below the corner of the only copies of those documents in existence.
My breath caught in my throat. “Mark, don’t…” I whispered to the screen, knowing he couldn’t hear me, but the terror was real. Those papers were my only link to who I really was before the system took me in.
Then, my phone rang again. It wasn’t a FaceTime call. It was an unknown, restricted number.
I answered it on the first ring, my heart hammering against my ribs exactly the way it had at 4:30 that morning.
“Clara,” a smooth, unfamiliar male voice said on the other end. It wasn’t Mark. It wasn’t Richard Vance.
“Who is this?” I demanded, my hand tightening around the phone so hard my knuckles turned white.
“Your husband is a very small fish in a very dangerous pond, Mrs. Galloway,” the voice said, calm, aristocratic, and completely devoid of emotion. “He thinks he’s stealing money from a real estate firm. He doesn’t realize he’s holding the ledger for an organization that doesn’t allow audits. You have thirty minutes to bring the Blue Horizon files to the industrial pier on 4th Street. If you don’t, your husband’s little divorce is going to become the least of your worries.”
“I don’t take threats,” I said, trying to keep my voice from trembling.
“It’s not a threat, Clara. It’s a trade,” the voice replied smoothly. “Look out the front window of your mentor’s lovely home.”
I stood up, my legs feeling like lead, and walked to Mrs. Henderson’s front window.
Sitting across the quiet, tree-lined street was a black SUV with tinted windows. The headlights flashed twice.
“We know the baby is with you,” the voice whispered into my ear. “Thirty minutes, Auditor. Or we audit you.”
The line went dead.
The Edge of the Abyss
I turned back to the room. Mrs. Henderson was already on her feet, her hand reaching for the landline to call the police chief. David Chen was frantically typing, trying to trace the restricted call.
But before Mrs. Henderson could lift the receiver, the power in the house suddenly cut out.
The humming of the refrigerator stopped. The printer died. The laptop screens went black as the Wi-Fi signal vanished. The electronic locks on Mrs. Henderson’s front door let out a sharp, digital whine as they defaulted to their locked, unpowered states.
In the sudden, heavy silence of the darkened house, my son Leo let out a sharp, piercing cry from his car seat.
I lunged toward him, scooping him into my arms, holding his warm, fragile body against my chest just like I had at four o’clock this morning. But this time, the kitchen wasn’t filled with the smell of bacon and burnt coffee.
It was filled with the distinct, metallic scent of ozone, and from the hallway upstairs, the slow, deliberate sound of heavy footsteps breaking through the back window echoed down the stairs.
Mark hadn’t just ruined our marriage. He had brought a monster to our doorstep, and the doors were now locked from the outside.
