4. Kaden
4
KADEN
The screams pour from Ethan's laptop speakers, each one dragging a fresh razor down my spine.
“Please...” Layla's voice breaks on a sob. “I can't ? —”
The sound of something wet and sharp cuts her off. Her next scream holds a different kind of agony.
My fist goes through the screen, silencing the audio but not the echoes inside my skull. Glass bites into my knuckles, blood trickling onto the shattered display.
“That's not—those screams are fake, right?” Ethan's voice shakes behind me. “Someone's messing with my system right now, making us hear?—”
“My daughter's doing this.”
The confession tastes like charcoal.
“Your what now?” Ethan chokes. Papers scatter as he stumbles back. “Hold up. You have a kid? An evil tech genius kid? Because she came through some seriously encrypted channels and—” He stops, his face draining of color. “Oh God. There are two of you. Two murderous, terrifying ... wait, how old is she?”
I yank the hard drive from the ruined laptop, my shoulder screaming in protest, but the pain is distant, meaningless.
“Twenty-two. And she learned from someone worse than me.”
“Worse than—” Ethan's nervous laugh dies as another audio file starts playing from his phone now that his laptop is destroyed. Layla's whimpers fill the playroom.
I'm across the room before he can blink, yanking his phone from his pocket and crushing it under my boot.
“She's in our systems,” Ethan whispers. “All of them. Like a ghost in the machine.”
“Then we become ghosts, too.” I move to Ethan’s makeshift desk, finding the children’s craft corner and unrolling a sheet of blank paper. I pluck a black crayon from a cup of them, muscle memory from another life taking over. “Tell me everything you remember about the Siren's Call's layout when you were studying the blueprints on your computer. Every exit, every service entrance.”
“Service entrance?” Ethan rubs his face in thought. “Uh, there's one in back, near the kitchens. I dropped off code for their point-of-sale systems last month. Had to dodge the seafood delivery guys.”
His eyes keep darting to his smashed phone like he's waiting for it to resurrect and scream again.
I press the crayon harder against the paper, letting the sharp strokes anchor me against Layla's fresh cries still ricocheting through my skull. The building takes shape under my hands—three stories of stone and glass wrapped in Greycliff's maritime Gothic aesthetic. But I'm more interested in what lies beneath. Old buildings like this always have secrets rotting in their bones.
“What do you remember?” I demand again. “Where were the stairs located? Elevators?”
The crayon snaps in my grip.
“Just the freight elevator for deliveries. But...” Ethan’s glasses fog from the hot flush of his cheeks as he leans over my shoulder. “Wait. When I was comparing the blueprints to the city records, the sub-levels should go way deeper. I remember thinking it was weird when I put them up side by side. The basement level we can access is only using, like, half the square footage.”
A sound pierces the air. High and electronic, like feedback from dead speakers. We both freeze as Layla's voice filters through, but this time it's different. Intimate.
“Tell me how he touched you,” Cassie's voice demands.
Layla's answering whimper sends an iceberg into my veins.
“Did his hands shake? When he wrapped them around your throat, did you feel how badly he wanted to squeeze?”
I rear up and head to my gear bag, pulling out the burner phone responsible and throwing it against the wall. It lands between a child’s stick-figure drawing of her complete family before raining down in plastic shards. The sound cuts off as abruptly as it started, leaving us in silence thick enough to choke on. But I know there will be more. Cassie's playing us like a symphony, each scream and sob a note designed to drive me closer to the edge.
“Jesus,” Ethan breathes. “That's seriously your kid torturing Layla? Because she sounds like she's gunning for Supervillain of the Year and—” He stumbles back when I turn to face him. “Right. Sorry. Not helping. I just—I’m really worried about Layla.”
I force my attention back to the paper, adding details in quick, savage strokes from a red crayon this time. “The original building was a bank. Pre-Prohibition. Which means...”
“Secret tunnels?” Ethan perks up. “Like for smuggling booze?”
“Like for moving money. And now probably moving other things.” I sketch in the likely routes, the paths I would use if I were setting up a criminal empire. “Cassie wouldn't waste time monitoring standard entrances. She's waiting for us to find the real way in.”
“So her name is Cassie. And it's definitely a trap.”
“Yes.”
“And we're going in anyway.”
“Yes.”
Ethan slumps into the tiny chair, his knees hovering near his ears. “Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Just wanted to make sure we're on the same suicidal page here.” He pushes his glasses up, smearing the sweat on his face. “Should I ask why Cassie's doing this? The whole torture-via-surround-sound thing?”
I drop the remnants of the red crayon from inside my fist. The lines on the paper have gone jagged, the potential secret tunnels looking more like slashes from a butcher knife.
“She wants me to suffer.” My statement comes out low and hoarse, scraped raw, though I haven’t been shouting. “And she knows the best way to do that is to make Layla suffer in my place.”
Ethan goes still. “That’s messed up.”
I turn away, but not before catching the shift in his expression. The hint of sympathy, of pity. It burns like acid on my skin. I haven't done anything to deserve it. Not after the things I've done. The things that led Cassie to this point.
“You're carrying extra gear,” I note, watching Ethan open a backpack beside him and pull out a tablet. “Destroy it.”
“But what if—” He catches my look and sighs, flicking a switch on the side of the tablet. “I'm keeping the tablet, but I’ll make sure it’s on silent. If Cassie’s in the system, maybe I can...” His fingers drum against the device. “Maybe I can track her signal or at least figure out which servers she's using.”
I turn back to the crude map, memorizing the likely tunnel routes. “You think you can out-code my daughter?”
“I think...” Ethan’s throat bobs. “I think Layla needs every advantage we can give her.”
The honest concern in his voice hits harder than it should. I've spent years building walls, learning to shut out everything but vengeance. But Ethan's humanity keeps finding cracks, seeping through like water around stone.
“Tell me about the security systems,” I say, changing the subject. “What did you notice when you had it up on your laptop?”
“Standard stuff on the surface. Cameras, motion sensors, key card readers.” He pushes his glasses up again, a nervous tic I'm starting to recognize. “But there were blind spots. Big ones. Like they wanted to look secure without actually watching certain areas.”
“Makes sense for a front operation.” I trace one of the theoretical tunnel routes. “They'd need ways to move product without documentation.”
“Product?” Ethan's voice cracks. “You mean people? Are they—” He looks green. “Never mind. I don't want to know.”
A phone starts ringing somewhere upstairs. We both tense, but it's just a standard landline. Still, Ethan's hands shake as he slips the tablet back into his pack.
“The basement level that's actually on the books,” he explains, his voice tight but steady, “it's got these thick walls here and here.” He points at sections of my map. “Way thicker than they need to be. Could be old vault spaces from the bank days, or...”
“Or places to hide doors that aren't supposed to exist.” I nod. “Good catch.”
He blinks at the praise, then frowns. “But Cassie will be expecting us to find those. She knows you'd look for hidden entrances.”
“She's not just expecting it. She's counting on it.” I start gathering my minimal gear, wincing when I forget about my shoulder and haul a strap over it. “That's why we're not going to use them.”
“We're not?”
“No.” I check my weapons, making sure everything's secure. “We're going through the front door.”
“The ... what?” Ethan scrambles to his feet. “But that's insane. They'll see us coming.”
“Exactly.” I meet his eyes. “Sometimes the best way to spring a trap is to walk right into it—just not in the way they expect.”
Understanding dawns on his face, followed quickly by horror. “Oh God. What are you planning?”
“Nothing complicated.” I head for the stairs. “We're going to give my daughter exactly what she wants: a show.”
“A show,” he echoes weakly, hurrying to keep up. “Great. Because your family's definition of entertainment seems really healthy and not at all terrifying.”
I pause at the bottom of the stairs, the weight of what we're about to do settling like spent gunpowder in my chest. “Ethan. You don't have to come.”
“Yeah, I do.” He straightens, steel entering his voice despite the fear in his eyes. “Layla's my friend. And friends don't let friends get tortured by psycho tech genius crime families alone.”
I don't respond, but I let him see my slight nod of acknowledgment before I start up the stairs.
Behind us, the crayon map lies abandoned on the floor, its red lines looking more and more like blood spatter in the basement light.