Chapter 12 - The Architect’s Signature
The morning light offered no comfort. While Lily was at school, I drove straight to the municipal records office downtown, my hands still stinging from the ceramic cuts. I bypassed the standard public kiosks and cornered an elderly clerk named Henderson, sliding a hundred-dollar bill across his scratched wooden counter.
"I need the original architectural blueprints for Unit 402 at the Meridian Towers," I said, my voice dropping to an urgent whisper. "Every revision. Every amendment."
Henderson raised a bushy gray eyebrow, slid the cash beneath a stack of parking tickets, and tapped away on his ancient terminal. Ten minutes later, he handed me a thick, yellowed roll of blueprint paper.
I unrolled it on a vacant table in the corner of the archive room, my eyes scanning the technical schematics of my new apartment building. My breath hitched in my throat.
Unit 402 wasn't just an apartment. It was a mirror image of the house we had burned to the ground.
Embedded between the master bedroom and the shared corridor was a hidden utility chase—a narrow, six-foot-wide dead space running the entire length of the floor. But what caught my eye wasn't the schematic itself; it was the signature block in the bottom right corner, stamped and approved three years before I had even signed the lease.
It wasn't stamped by the building developer. It bore the corporate seal of Vance & Brother Architecture—the firm Julian and I had founded together before our bitter fallout. And the project manager listed on the revision documents wasn't Vanessa.
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It was Julian.
He hadn't just built a cage in our suburban home. He had systematically mapped out our entire escape route across multiple properties years in advance, ensuring that no matter where I ran after the dust settled, I would always walk straight back into his trap.
