Chapter 3 - THE VOICES IN THE HALL
“Emma! Please!”
The small, terrified voice bleeding through the heavy oak door belonged to my ten-year-old brother. The brother who was supposed to be heavily sedated in a sterile isolation ward at Chicago Memorial, sixty miles away.
I stopped breathing. The world tilted on its axis.
“Tommy?” I choked out, stumbling toward the door. My hand reached for the deadbolt.
“Emma, don’t touch that lock!” Liam barked.
I ignored him. My fingers gripped the cold brass. “Tommy! I’m here! I’m—”
A massive, warm hand clamped over my wrist, violently yanking me backward. Liam had dragged his ruined body out of the bed. He was standing on one leg, leaning heavily against the wall, his face pale with agony, but his grip on my arm was like an iron vise.
“Let me go!” I screamed, hitting his chest. “That’s my brother!”
“Listen to me,” Liam gritted out, his breath hot and ragged against my ear. He pressed me against the wall, standing between me and the door, his gun raised. “Listen to the voice.”
“Emma, let me in! I’m scared!” The voice cried from the hall.
Tears streamed down my face. I struggled against Liam’s weight. “He’s terrified, Liam, you sociopath, let me open the door!”
“Tommy has leukemia, Emma,” Liam said, his voice dropping into a harsh, commanding whisper. “He just finished a brutal chemo cycle last week. His lungs are weak. Does that sound like a boy who can scream at the top of his lungs after climbing three flights of stairs?”
I froze. The struggling stopped.
I listened.
“Emma, please! I’m scared!”
The cadence. The pitch. It was exactly the same as the first time. The exact same inflection. The exact same pause between sentences.
It was a recording.
Nausea hit me so hard my knees buckled. Liam caught me, wrapping his free arm around my waist to keep me upright. His body heat was the only thing anchoring me to reality.
“They recorded him,” I whispered, staring in horror at the door. “How did they get a recording of him?”
“To get you to open this door,” Liam answered grimly. He slowly backed us away from the entrance, dragging his pinned leg, never lowering his weapon. “Get into the bathroom. Now.”
Before I could move, the sound of the recording abruptly cut off.
Heavy silence fell over the hallway. Then, a calm, chillingly familiar voice spoke through the wood.
“She’s smarter than you thought, Arthur.”
It was the voice of the anonymous caller. The man who had hired me over the phone.
“Liam, little brother,” the man in the hall continued, his tone dripping with mock affection. “I know you’re in there. And I know you’re in bad shape. Be a good boy and open the door. We just want the nurse.”
I looked up at Liam. His face had drained of all color, replacing the pain with a look of pure, unadulterated hatred.
“Arthur,” Liam breathed.
“Your brother?” I whispered, terrified.
“Half-brother,” Liam corrected softly, his eyes locked on the door. “He’s the one who put me in this bed.”
“We don’t have all day, Liam,” Arthur’s voice drifted through the wood. “The estate is breached. Leo and his loyal guard dogs are currently pinned down in the west wing. You have exactly two minutes to send Emma out. If you do, I’ll let you bleed out in peace.”
“And if I don’t?” Liam called back.
“Then I’ll detonate the breaching charge on this door, kill you both, and make sure little Tommy’s experimental trial is permanently cancelled.”
A piece of paper slid under the gap of the door.
Liam nodded toward it. I scrambled on my hands and knees, terrified of a bullet coming through the wood, and snatched the paper. I scrambled back to the bathroom doorway, my hands shaking uncontrollably as I turned it over.
It was a Polaroid photograph.
It showed Tommy. He was asleep in his hospital bed, clutching the stuffed bear I bought him for his birthday. But the terrifying part wasn’t Tommy. It was the man standing next to the bed, holding the camera. A tall man in a tailored suit, his face out of frame, resting one hand gently, menacingly, on Tommy’s fragile shoulder.
The time stamp on the bottom of the photo was from twenty minutes ago.
“He’s there,” I sobbed, crumbling against the bathroom tiles. “He’s actually at the hospital. He’s going to kill my brother.”
Liam looked at the photograph in my shaking hands. Something shifted in his cold, calculating eyes. The hardened criminal faded, and for a split second, I saw profound regret.
“He won’t kill him,” Liam said softly. “He needs him.”
“For what?!” I cried quietly. “What could a dying ten-year-old possibly have to do with you?!”
“Nothing to do with me,” Liam said. He checked the magazine of his handgun and snapped it back into place. “Everything to do with your father.”
I stopped crying. The air left my lungs. “My father died in a car crash twelve years ago.”
“Your father was Thomas Hayes,” Liam said, leaning heavily against the doorframe, his eyes scanning the room for secondary exits. “He was the lead forensic accountant for my father’s enterprise. Before he died, he locked away fifty million dollars in an offshore trust. A trust that can only be unlocked by the biometric signature of his living heir.”
He looked down at me, his gaze piercing right through my soul.
“Arthur doesn't want me dead, Emma. He wants the money. And you’re the only key left.”
Suddenly, a loud, electronic beep echoed from the hallway.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
“Ten seconds, Liam!” Arthur called out. “Time’s up.”
Liam moved faster than a wounded man should. He grabbed my wrist, yanked me off the floor, and shoved me hard into the massive walk-in closet behind the bathroom.
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“Stay down and cover your ears!” he roared.
He didn’t follow me in. Instead, he turned back toward the heavy oak door, raising his gun, placing his own broken body between the explosives and me.
