Chapter 20
The fire alarm began to shriek, a deafening, piercing sound that filled the dark house.
“Lauren! Get Noah and get out the front door! Now!” Ethan roared, pushing Melissa toward the hallway.
He ran toward the front of the house, but as he reached the living room, he saw the orange flames licking against the front porch windows. The front exit was completely blocked by a wall of fire. The dry wood of the porch was catching fast, fueled by the gasoline.
Lauren came sprinting down the stairs, clutching Noah tightly to her chest. Noah was screaming, burying his face in her neck.
“The front is blocked! Go out the back!” Ethan yelled, guiding them toward the kitchen.
They ran past Melissa, stepping over the shattered glass of the French doors and out into the freezing winter night. The snow crunched under their bare feet. They ran to the edge of the yard, turning back to see their beautiful home—the sanctuary they had fought a year to protect—rapidly being swallowed by angry, roaring flames.
“My house...” Lauren whispered, collapsing into the snow, holding Noah tight. “Our home...”
Ethan stood in the snow, his chest heaving, his mind numb with shock.
Suddenly, Melissa pointed a shaking finger toward the driveway. “Ethan... look.”
Standing near Ethan’s truck, illuminated by the bright, terrifying glow of the fire, was Patricia.
She wasn't running. She wasn't screaming. She was just standing there, a empty plastic gas can sitting at her feet. She was staring at the burning house with a look of peaceful, serene satisfaction on her face.
But as Ethan began to march toward her, his face contorted in pure, unadulterated rage, Patricia didn't flinch. She slowly turned her head and looked directly at him.
Then, she looked down at her hand.
In her hand, she wasn't holding a lighter. She was holding Ethan’s old phone—the one with the Yahoo account logged in. A text message was open on the screen, addressed to an unknown number.
Patricia looked at Ethan, her smile cold, sharp, and victorious.
“You thought you saved them, Ethan,” she called out over the roar of the fire, her voice echoing in the freezing air. “But you forgot to check who else was in the house before you closed the door.”
Before Ethan could process her words, his phone—which suddenly regained a single bar of signal—vibrated violently in his pocket.
It was a text from a number he didn't recognize. An image file.
With trembling, frozen fingers, Ethan unlocked his phone and opened the photo.
His heart stopped. The fire around him seemed to freeze.
The photograph was a live, real-time shot of the inside of Noah’s preschool classroom, taken from the dark hallway outside. Sitting in the corner of the photo was a small, black backpack with a dinosaur print on it.
Noah’s spare backpack. The one he had left at school that afternoon.
But glued to the bottom of the backpack was a small, blinking red light. A audio and location tracker that had been broadcasting their location, their words, and their lives for the last six months.
And underneath the photo was a single sentence from the unknown number:
‘The fire is just a distraction, Ethan. Look behind you.’
Ethan whipped around toward the snow where Lauren and Noah had been sitting just seconds ago.
The snow was empty. Only Lauren’s cardigan lay abandoned on the white ground.
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And in the distance, the sound of a car engine roared to life, speeding away into the dark, snowy night.
Ethan screamed.
