Chapter 4 - The Voice at the Door
I froze.
The sound of that voice tore through the silence of the room like a jagged blade.
Logan.
After seven months of agonizing silence, of crying myself to sleep in a drafty room, of wondering if he had ever cared at all—he was standing on the other side of a hospital door.
My hand moved instinctively toward the latch.
"Joanna, no!" Dr. Wright hissed, lunging forward and grabbing my wrist with surprising strength. "Look at my face! That’s not a homecoming. That’s a trap."
Through the frosted glass, I could see the blurred silhouettes of two men standing in the corridor. One was tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a heavy overcoat. The other was slighter, his head bowed slightly as if carrying an unbearable weight.
"Joanna, I know you're in there," Logan’s voice called out again, sounding strained, breathless, and painfully artificial. "Please... just open the door. We need to talk."
"Logan?" I called out, my voice cracking with a mixture of raw fury and desperate longing. "Where have you been? Why did you leave me?!"
"I had no choice, Jo," he replied from the hallway, his voice wavering. "The people I work for... they wouldn't let me stay. But if you open the door right now, and give the baby to Marcus, we can fix this. They promised me you'd be left alone."
The blood rushed violently in my ears.
Give the baby to Marcus.
Those eight words destroyed every lingering shred of doubt, every foolish hope that my fiancé had somehow come back to rescue us. He wasn't here to save his son. He was delivering him. He had become just another instrument of the very monsters who had hunted him down.
Dr. Wright looked at me, his eyes full of profound, broken sorrow.
"Now you see," the old man whispered. "The trust didn't just break him, Joanna. They reprogrammed him. He’s one of them now."
May you like
Outside, the handle of the heavy wooden door jiggled violently.
"Dr. Wright, this is your final warning," the second voice—Marcus Vance—spoke up, cutting through Logan's pathetic pleading with the cold authority of a executioner. "Unlock the door, or we breach."
