Chapter 5 - THE MISSING SEVEN MONTHS
Emergency lights turned the room red.
Someone grabbed my wrist.
I screamed and struck blindly.
“It’s me,” Michael whispered.
He pulled me from the bed while alarms sounded in the hallway. Priya opened a supply-room door and guided us inside.
“Daniel cut power to this wing,” she said.
Michael held my shoulders.
“You need to listen. We have less than a minute.”
“Why did you disappear?”
“I didn’t. Daniel blocked me, forged emails, and filed a restraining order in your name.”
He showed me a photograph on his phone.
I was standing beside Lauren outside a courthouse.
My face looked vacant.
The timestamp was seven months earlier.
“I don’t remember that.”
“You were drugged.”
Michael had begun investigating after receiving a voicemail from me at 3:12 one morning. In the recording, I whispered that Daniel was keeping me in “the basement room.”
Our house had no basement.
At least, none that I knew of.
Michael traced Daniel’s finances and discovered payments to a construction company that specialized in hidden residential rooms.
The garage floor had been rebuilt two years earlier.
“The cage isn’t the worst part,” he said.
Footsteps approached outside.
Priya killed the light on her phone.
Michael pressed the flash drive into my palm.
“The videos show him training you to repeat statements. He made you say you were unstable, suicidal, violent. Lauren documented every forced confession as a medical episode.”
“Why?”
“Your inheritance.”
My father had left me six million dollars in a trust controlled by Daniel only if I were declared mentally incompetent or dead.
The death certificate gave him access to part of it.
The guardianship would give him the rest.
A shadow crossed beneath the supply-room door.
Daniel’s voice came softly from the hallway.
“Emily?”
My breath stopped.
“I know you’re scared.”
Michael raised a metal IV pole.
Daniel continued, “Your brother is using you. He wants the trust.”
Michael shook his head.
“He’ll say anything.”
“Come out,” Daniel said, “and I won’t press charges against him.”
The doorknob moved.
Priya pointed toward a ceiling vent large enough to reach the adjoining room. Michael climbed onto a shelf and pulled it open.
As he lifted me, pain tightened across my abdomen.
Not a kick.
A contraction.
I bit my hand to keep from crying out.
Daniel heard the shelf creak.
The door slammed inward.
Michael pushed me into the vent just as Daniel entered.
I crawled through darkness with the flash drive clenched between my teeth.
Behind me, something struck the floor.
Then Michael screamed.
I reached the next room and dropped onto a desk.
A computer monitor glowed in front of me.
On the screen was a live security feed from my garage.
May you like
The cage was empty.
But the concrete floor beneath it was opening.
