Chapter 2 The Voice That Wasn't There

Corinne's POV

I tried to twist free, and the stranger's grip only tightened, so I did the one thing my body still remembered how to do: I screamed my father's name.

"Dad!"

The sound tore out of me louder than anything I'd ever let myself make in that house, and for half a second the whole hallway seemed to hold its breath along with me. Then another set of hands grabbed my arm from the other side, and I swung around ready to fight both of them at once, ready to bite and kick and do whatever it took to get back to that office door.

"Police! Stop moving!"

A flashlight beam hit me straight in the face. I froze, chest heaving, and through the white glare I made out a badge, a dark uniform, a man maybe my dad's age telling me to get down, get back, get outside right now. The stranger who'd grabbed me first was gone. I don't know when he let go. I don't know which direction he ran. One second there was a hand on my shoulder and a voice telling me not to move, and the next there was only this officer, real and solid and shouting for backup into the radio clipped to his chest.

"My dad is in there," I said, and my voice cracked right down the middle of the sentence. "He just called my name, I heard him, he's in the office,"

"Ma'am, I need you to step outside."

"He said run, he told me to run, that means he needs help, that means,"

"Ma'am." The officer's voice dropped, and something in the way he said it made my stomach fold in on itself. He wasn't telling me to be quiet because I was being difficult. He was telling me to be quiet the way you talk to someone you're trying to protect from something you've already seen.

That's when I looked past him, toward the bottom of the stairs.

My dad's shoe was lying on its side on the third step, the brown loafer he wore every single day to the accounting office downtown, the one with the worn-down heel he kept saying he'd replace and never did. It looked so normal sitting there. So completely ordinary. Like he'd just kicked it off to relax after work.

Except it was alone. No matching shoe beside it. And on the floor next to the step, dark and spreading and catching the flashlight beam in a way that made my whole body go cold from the inside out, there was blood.

I don't remember deciding to move. I just remember the officer's arm suddenly across my chest, solid as a bar, holding me back from the stairs like I weighed nothing at all.

"You don't want to go over there," he said quietly. "Not yet."

"That's blood." My voice came out strange, flat, as it belonged to someone else. "Whose blood is that? Where's my dad? Where is he? Why isn't he answering me? I heard him, I swear I heard him say my name."

More officers were coming through the front door now, moving past me into the house with their own flashlights cutting through the dark, calling out Room clear, room clear, one by one down the hallway. I stood frozen where the officer had planted me, staring at that single shoe on the stairs, waiting for someone to bring my father around the corner alive and annoyed and asking why there were police cars parked outside his own house.

Nobody did.

Minutes passed like that; I couldn't tell you how many. Time had stopped meaning anything normal, until one of the officers came out of the hallway that led to Dad's office. He was holding something small and black between two gloved fingers, turning it slightly under his flashlight like he was trying to make sense of it himself.

"Found this on the desk," he said to the officer holding me back. "Recorder was still running when we got in there. Whole room's been gone through, drawers open, papers everywhere. But this thing was just sitting right in the middle of the desk. Like somebody wanted it found."

He pressed a button.

And my father's voice came out of that little speaker, tinny and small and horribly wrong-sounding through a machine instead of through his actual mouth, but it was him. It was absolutely him.

"Corinne. Run."

Then a pause, a beat of static, and it played again.

"Corinne. Run."

Over and over. The same four words, looping endlessly, the same shake in his voice each time because it was the same recording repeating itself, not my father calling out to me in real time from somewhere in that house, a recording someone had left running, timed, waiting, like they'd known exactly when I would walk through that door and exactly what they wanted me to feel the moment I did.

I hadn't heard my father tonight. Not really. I'd heard a message somebody else had set up for me to find.

Which meant whoever had done this had known I was coming home at that exact hour, on that exact night, walking that exact route from the diner. Which meant this hadn't happened to my father in some random burst of bad luck.

It had been planned around me.

The officer holding me back must have felt my legs give out a little, because his grip shifted, steadying me instead of restraining me now. I couldn't feel my own hands. I couldn't feel anything except that voice still looping behind me, my father's voice, telling me to run from a room he might not even be alive in anymore.

"Where is he?" I whispered, to no one, to everyone. "If that's a recording, then where is my dad right now?"

Nobody answered me.

And that's when I saw it, past the shoulder of the officer in front of me, through the open office doorway at the end of the hall, lit up harsh and sudden as someone finally found the light switch inside. Papers scattered everywhere. A chair knocked on its side.

And on the far wall, written in something dark and wet that I refused, refused, refused to let myself believe was what it looked like, three words stared back at me like they'd been waiting for me all along.

HE KNOWS NOW.