He stood there, a piece of roast beef halfway to his mouth, chewing slowly. He looked down at me, crumpled on the floor in a growing pool of my own blood, and his expression was one of pure, unadulterated disgust.
“Stop being so dramatic,” he said, setting his fork down. “You’re making a mess. Get up and clean the floor.”
His mother laughed, a sound like shattering glass.
Desperation gave me strength. I started to crawl, inch by painful inch, toward my phone, lying on the kitchen table. I needed an ambulance. I needed help. My fingers were just inches away when a shiny, black leather shoe descended, crushing my hand against the cold tile.
Dave looked down at me, his face a mask of cruel indifference. He bent down, picked up my phone, and with a casual flick of his wrist, threw it against the far wall.
It hit with a sickening crunch, the screen exploding into a spiderweb of black before going dark. My last lifeline was gone.
Chapter 2: The Last Call
The world was a tunnel of pain. The only thing in focus was Dave’s face, sneering down at me.
“No one is coming to save you,” he said.
I looked into his eyes, the eyes of the man I had once loved, and I saw nothing. A void.
My mind raced, searching for an escape, a weapon, anything. And then I found it. The one thing he couldn’t break. The one person he had always underestimated.
“Call my father,” I gasped, the words tasting like blood and defeat.
Dave stared at me, then threw his head back and laughed. It was a loud, ugly, braying sound that echoed in the sterile kitchen.
“Call your father?” he roared. “That dirt-under-the-fingernails, vegetable-growing old man? What’s he going to do? Throw a tomato at me?”
“Just… call him,” I pleaded.
For two years, I had protected them from the truth. When they asked what my dad did before he retired to his small farm, I let them believe the narrative they created. Farmer. Gardener. Simple country folk. I never told them about the medals hidden in a dusty box in his study. I never mentioned the letters he received from the Secretary of Defense. I kept his past a secret because I knew what he was capable of, and I didn’t want that world to ever touch mine.
“Fine,” Dave smirked, pulling out his own expensive smartphone. The cruelty was a game to him now. “Let’s let the old man hear what a pathetic failure his daughter turned out to be.”
He scrolled through his contacts, found “Clara’s Dad,” and hit the call button. He put it on speakerphone, holding it down near my face.
The phone rang once. Twice.
“Hello?” My father’s voice. Calm. Steady. The voice that had read me bedtime stories and taught me how to tie my shoes.
“Hello? Mr. Vance?” Dave said, his voice dripping with condescending amusement. “This is Dave. Listen, you might want to come over. Your daughter is bleeding all over my floor. Come clean it up.”
There was a pause on the other end. A thick, heavy silence that seemed to absorb all the sound in the room. I expected panic. Pleading. Questions.
There was none of that.
When my father spoke again, his voice had changed. The warmth was gone. It was replaced by something else. Something cold and flat and hard, like metal grinding against stone.
“Stay on the line,” my father commanded. “Do not hang up.”
Dave snorted. “Or what, old man?”
“I’m five minutes away.”
The line didn’t go dead. There was no click. There was just the faint, ambient sound of the open connection.
The next five minutes were the longest of my life. Dave paced the kitchen, gloating. Mrs. Higgins complained about her ruined dinner. I lay on the floor, pressing a dish towel to my stomach, praying to a God I wasn’t sure I believed in.
And through the speaker of Dave’s phone, there was only a chilling, watchful silence.
Then we heard it.
