Chapter 5 - THE REUNION IN THE DARKTwo nights later, the plan went into motion.
We were back in Albany, parked three blocks away from my old neighborhood in a nondescript, heavily tinted van. Inside, banks of monitors flickered with live surveillance feeds—traffic cameras, satellite coordinates, and internal thermal scans of my own house.
Daniel was inside.
Through the monitor, we watched him pace the length of our living room. The TV was off. The curtains were drawn tight. He poured himself a heavy glass of bourbon, his movements jerky, lacking the calm, terrifying composure he had displayed on the mountain.
The guilt wasn't eating him—the anticipation was. He was waiting for the financial clearance to clear. He was waiting to be a rich man.
"He thinks he won," I whispered, sitting in the passenger seat beside Adrien. My fingers traced the cold metal of a small, encrypted tablet resting on my lap.
"Greed makes men stupid," Adrien replied, his eyes fixed on the primary monitor. "It narrows their vision until they can't see the blade coming from behind."
"It's time," I said.
Adrien nodded and handed me a secure satellite phone. "Dial his personal line. Keep him on long enough for our encryption protocol to mirror his IP address and lock his home firewall from the outside."
My heart hammered against my ribs. I tapped in the ten-digit number I had dialed thousands of times over the last eight years—the number of the man who had kissed my cheek, shared my bed, and then left me to freeze in a dark mountain pass.
It rang twice. Then three times.
On the fourth ring, a strained, breathless voice answered.
"Hello?"
Hearing his voice sent a shiver of adrenaline straight down my spine, but the fear was gone, replaced by a cold, sharp clarity.
"Hello, Daniel," I said.
Silence descended on the line. Absolute, frozen silence. On the monitor, we saw Daniel freeze mid-stride, his glass hovering halfway to his mouth. The color drained completely from his face, leaving him looking like a corpse under the harsh overhead lights.
"Clare?" His voice was a thin, panicked croak. "Clare, where are you? Is this a joke? Who is this?"
"You didn't check what I had hidden beneath my coat, Daniel," I whispered, leaning into the microphone. "You thought the snow would finish the job. You thought you could bury your secrets right along with me."
On the screen, Daniel dropped his glass. Amber liquid and shards of crystal exploded across the hardwood floor, but he didn't even look down. His head snapped toward the hallway, his eyes wild with terror as he scanned an empty, quiet house.
"No," he stammered, backing away from the phone. "No, you're dead. The police... they found your car, they found your tracks—"
"The police found a ghost," I said softly. "And now, Daniel, the ghost is coming home to collect."
May you like
I tapped a single button on my tablet, executing the override protocol.
Across the monitor, every light in Daniel’s house flickered violently, then died, plunging him into absolute, terrifying darkness.
