Chapter 10 - The Race Across Town
My heart stopped beating. The air vanished from my lungs.
"Derek," I choked out, holding the phone out so hard my hand shook violently. "Look at the screen. Look at it!"
Derek grabbed the phone, his eyes scanning the image and the text. The color drained from his face until he looked like a ghost.
"That's Leah's house," he whispered, pure panic surging in his voice. "She's holding Clara. Who sent this?"
"There's only one person who knows we left the house, and only one person vicious enough to use a child as leverage," I said, scrambling backward from the table, my chair screeching against the concrete floor. "Mom called someone from the back of that police cruiser. Or Brenda had a backup accomplice waiting outside the precinct."
We didn't talk. We didn't lock the storage unit door. We sprinted down the corridor of the storage facility like our lives—and our daughter's life—depended on every single second.
Derek threw himself behind the steering wheel of the sedan, burning rubber as he slammed the transmission into drive and rocketed out of the Apex compound without waiting for the security gate to fully open.
The engine screamed at six thousand RPMs as we tore down Industrial Parkway toward the highway, the rain sheeting across the windshield faster than the wipers could clear it.
"Call Leah!" Derek yelled over the roar of the motor, his knuckles white as death on the steering wheel. "Call her right now!"
I punched Leah’s number into my phone, my fingers slipping against the glass screen.
It rang once. Twice. Three times.
“Come on, Leah, pick up, pick up...” I muttered under my breath, my chest heaving with terror.
On the fourth ring, the line clicked open.
"Eleanor?" Leah’s voice came through the speaker, sounding confused and slightly breathless. "El, why are you calling? I just put Clara down in the bassinet five minutes ago—"
"Leah, listen to me very carefully," I screamed over the sound of the highway wind rushing past our windows. "Get out of the house. Right now! Grab Clara and get out the back door!"
"What? El, what are you talking about? There's nobody here, I—"
A sudden, sharp crash echoed through the phone line—the sound of shattering glass, followed by a heavy thud and a terrifying, high-pitched scream from Leah.
"Leah! Leah!" I screamed into the phone.
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Then a strange, metallic voice answered on the other end of the line, low and cold:
"Too late, Mrs. Moretti. Turn the car around and come back to the house alone. Or you'll never see your daughter take another breath."
