CHAPTER 2 — The Trap No One Expected
The man stood perfectly still.
His expression changed instantly.
Until that moment, he had looked calm...
Almost confident.
Now he looked uncertain.
"Your... father?" he asked carefully.
Sofia nodded without hesitation.
"Yes."
She pointed behind the stranger.
"He's waiting."
The man instinctively turned his head.
There was no one.
But the brief distraction was enough.
Sofia wasn't trying to convince him.
She was buying time.
The stranger looked back at her.
This child wasn't behaving like any frightened seven-year-old.
She wasn't crying.
She wasn't running.
She wasn't begging for help.
Instead...
She looked almost as if she knew something he didn't.
The man suddenly became cautious.
"What does your father do?" he asked.
Sofia answered immediately.
"Police."
It wasn't entirely true.
Her father wasn't a police officer anymore.
He had spent twenty years working undercover before retiring.
Almost everyone in town still knew him.
Many criminals remembered his face.
The stranger swallowed hard.
Then Sofia spoke again.
"He told me that if anyone ever follows me..."
"...I should keep talking until he gets here."
Silence.
A cold breeze swept through the street.
The man glanced around.
Windows.
Parked cars.
Security cameras.
A delivery van turning onto the corner.
His breathing became heavier.
Something didn't feel right anymore.
He had followed children before.
They always panicked.
This one...
Was making him nervous.
Then Sofia calmly raised her left wrist and looked at her bright pink children's watch.
"Oh..."
she whispered.
"Three seconds."
The stranger frowned.
"What?"
"Three..."
She smiled.
"Two..."
The man suddenly took one step backward.
"One..."
At that exact second...
A deafening police siren exploded from the end of the street.
The stranger's face turned completely pale.
Without thinking, he spun around and ran as fast as he could.
But what he didn't know...
Was that Sofia had never called the police.
The siren came from a patrol car responding to an entirely different emergency several blocks away.
It was nothing more than an incredible coincidence.
Yet that single sound shattered the stranger's confidence.
He sprinted straight into a nearby alley...
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Never realizing that someone else had been quietly watching everything from an upstairs apartment window—with a phone already recording his face.
That video would soon uncover a terrifying secret that would shock the entire city...
