I stopped at an entry dated exactly three months ago—the exact time I had started planning to buy his new house.
“They found us. I thought thirty years of hiding in the dirt would make them forget, but the bloodline never forgets. A man named Vance called the landline today. He knows about Louis. He knows about his job in Buckhead. He said if I don’t pay the ‘ancestral debt’ by the end of the year, they won’t just ruin Louis’s career—they will make sure he suffers the same fate his mother did. My heart is failing me. I don’t have the strength to fight them anymore.”
My breath hitched. Ancestral debt? Who was Vance?
I frantically turned to the next page. The entry was dated just four days ago—the day before Mr. Raymond came to my apartment to ask for the twenty thousand dollars.
“The doctor told me I need a twenty-thousand-dollar surgery to live. But Vance called again. He demanded twenty thousand dollars by Friday, or his men will visit Louis at his office. I don’t need the money for surgery. I am going to ask Louis for a loan. I will pretend it is for my heart. If he gives it to me, I will hand it over to Vance and take the secret to my grave. If he refuses… God have mercy on my son, because I cannot protect him from what is coming.”
The blood rushed out of my face. The room seemed to spin.
The $20,000 wasn’t for a medical bill. He had used the medical diagnosis as a cover story to extort the money from me to pay off a dangerous syndicate that was targeting me.
But I hadn’t given him the cash. I had bypassed him entirely and paid the hospital directly.
Which meant… Vance never got his money.
And today was Friday.
The Uninvited Guest
My phone suddenly vibrated violently in my pocket, shattering the silence of the empty room. The caller ID showed my wife’s name.
With trembling hands, I pressed the answer button. “Sarah? Thank god. Listen to me, you need to call hospital security right now—”
“Louis?”
The voice on the other end wasn’t Sarah’s. It was a deep, gravelly, and entirely unfamiliar male voice. It possessed a cold, chilling calmness that made every hair on my arms stand up.
“Who is this?” I demanded, my voice cracking with absolute terror. “Where is my wife? Where is my father?”
“Your father is currently resting very comfortably in his post-op bed,” the voice replied smoothly. “And your lovely wife is sitting right next to me, holding my hand. She’s a bit shaken, but otherwise unharmed. For now.”
In the background, I heard a muffled, terrified whimper. It was Sarah.
“What do you want?” I screamed into the phone, slamming my fist against the wooden crate. “I’ll give you whatever you want! Just don’t touch them!”
