CHAPTER 2 — The Dead Man Begins Sending Messages
Sophia barely slept.
She locked every door.
Every window.
Every alarm.
Still, she couldn't stop staring at the old photograph.
At exactly 2:13 a.m., her phone vibrated.
Unknown Number.
No caller ID.
She answered without speaking.
Only breathing.
Then...
A man's voice.
Soft.
Calm.
"I told you..."
"...you missed."
Her blood froze.
"Adrian?"
Silence.
The call ended.
She immediately called the police.
The number didn't exist.
By morning, panic had replaced confidence.
She ordered every security recording from the estate.
At 3:04 a.m., one outdoor camera briefly flickered.
For exactly four seconds.
When the image returned...
Someone had placed Adrian's empty wheelchair directly in front of the mansion gates.
Covered in dried blood.
Police arrived within minutes.
The blood belonged to Adrian.
DNA confirmed it.
But there was something impossible.
The blood was fresh.
Less than twelve hours old.
Search teams returned to Black Raven Point.
Nothing.
No footprints.
No body.
No drag marks.
Detective Rachel Monroe noticed something nobody else did.
One tire of the wheelchair was coated with fine white dust.
Not cliff soil.
Not beach sand.
Laboratory analysis identified crushed limestone mixed with volcanic ash.
The mixture existed in only one abandoned location within three hundred miles.
An underground military bunker closed in 1984.
Before police could search it...
Someone broke into Adrian's private office.
Nothing valuable was stolen.
Only one object disappeared.
His personal journal.
Inside that journal, hidden between blank pages, Adrian had secretly documented everything he feared.
Including one sentence he had written six months earlier.
"If I disappear... don't trust my wife."
But Sophia never knew the journal existed.
She only knew someone else wanted it more than she did.
Then another envelope arrived.
Inside...
A handwritten confession.
Not Adrian's.
Her father's.
Dated thirty-one years earlier.
"I accepted twenty million dollars to exchange two newborn babies at Saint Margaret Hospital."
Sophia read it three times.
The room spun.
May you like
Because Adrian had been born in that hospital.
So had she.
