Just then, the phone in my hand vibrated silently, a powerful jolt of electricity against my palm. I nearly screamed. The screen lit up, blindingly bright in the pitch-black attic. A text message from Mara.
*FBI and local police are two minutes out. Stay hidden. Do not make a sound. Noah is safe. We intercepted him on the interstate.*
I squeezed my eyes shut, a torrent of hot, silent tears streaming down my face, carving paths through the dust on my cheeks. *Safe.* The most beautiful word in the English language. Noah was safe. Mara had him. The relief was so immense, so powerful, it almost buckled me.
Below, the sharp, jarring ring of a phone cut through the tension. Caleb’s phone.
He answered it, his tone clipped and impatient. “Mom?”
I watched, transfixed, as his entire demeanor shifted. The calm, controlled facade crumbled, replaced by a look of disbelief, then dawning horror. His face went pale, a stark, sickly white in the dim light.
“What do you mean they took him? What are you talking about?” he hissed into the phone.
The stranger stepped closer, his posture instantly alert. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
Caleb lowered the phone, his hand trembling slightly. He looked at the other man, his eyes wide with a mixture of fury and panic. “Noah’s gone. The feds. Police stopped them on the highway.”
The man in the raincoat let out a string of curses, his voice a venomous whisper. Then Caleb’s head snapped up.
He wasn’t looking directly at me, not at the gap in the floorboards. He was looking toward the attic door, his gaze sweeping the ceiling of the hallway as if he could bore through the plaster with the intensity of his stare. A cold dread, sharper and more potent than anything I had felt before, seized me.
“Where’s Elise?” he asked, his voice suddenly, terrifyingly smooth again. The sleepy husband, the concerned father. A phantom.
My heart stopped beating. He began moving down the hallway, a predator stalking its prey in its own den. He pushed open the door to the guest room, then the bathroom.
“Elise?” he called out, his voice a honeyed poison. “Baby, where are you? Are you okay?”
I scrambled backward on my hands and knees, pressing myself into the corner behind a stack of plastic storage bins and an old, forgotten Christmas tree. My breath was a ragged, silent scream in my lungs. I was trapped.
The attic stairs creaked.
Once.
