Chapter 15 Jack
Three days.
Seventy-two hours since Carter's last text, and the penthouse had become a beautiful prison. I couldn't tell anymore where the walls ended, and anxiety began. Both were constricting and oppressing.
Anna moved through the space like a ghost, her footsteps silent on floors she used to traverse with easy confidence. She jumped at shadows. Daisy had stopped asking to go to the park. Even Mrs. Rosa's humming had ceased.
The only sounds were Officer Martinez's measured footsteps during his hourly perimeter checks and the oppressive hum of the security monitor in my office, a constant reminder that we were being protected from a threat I couldn't see, couldn't fight, couldn't control.
My feelings were barbed wire; every time I reached for one, another cut deep.
This morning, I watched Anna help Daisy with her letters at the kitchen table. Sunlight caught in Anna's dark hair, turning it warm, almost golden. Daisy had laughed at something she'd said, and the sound had filled the hollow spaces in my chest with something warm and terrifying.
Then I had remembered: This woman had been in the car. Had heard the impact. Had stayed silent while Elena bled out on the pavement.
The warmth curdled instantly into something acid. Self-loathing so pure it tasted like copper on my tongue.
I was falling for the woman whose silence had followed my wife's last breath. What kind of man did that make me? What kind of father wanted the person connected to his daughter's trauma?
And yet, God help me—when I imagined her gone, when I pictured Daisy's face if Anna disappeared, the grief was sharper than any guilt.
I needed air that hadn't been filtered through threat assessments and armed security.
"I'm going out," I told Officer Martinez, my voice brusque. "One hour. You have my direct line. Do not let Anna leave. Do not open the door for anyone."
He gave a professional nod. "Understood, Mr. Spencer."
I didn't know where I was going until the car was moving, my hands on the wheel, turning not toward the office but onto the winding, tree-lined road that led to the cemetery.
The grave was simple. Pale granite, clean lines, words that reduced a vibrant life to dates and roles:
Beloved Wife, Mother, Teacher.
I'd chosen it. Now it felt like a monument to my failure.
I bent, my knees sinking into the soft grass. Spring had been kind, wildflowers grew at the edges, little bursts of purple and yellow that Elena would have loved. That she would never see.
"I don't know what I'm doing." My voice cracked, raw and unfamiliar in the quiet cemetery. A bird called somewhere overhead. Normal life, continuing without permission. "I brought her into our home. Anna. The woman who was there when you died."
The words tasted wrong. As if that's all she was.
As if I hadn't memorized the way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she concentrated.
As if I didn't know she took her coffee black because she barely could afford more after running from Carter.
As if I hadn't started listening for her footsteps the way I used to listen for Elena's.
"I brought her in to punish her." I pressed my palm flat against the cold stone, needing something solid. "And now Daisy speaks again… because of her. Laughs because of her. The house is alive because of her."
My voice could barely steady itself, my throat twisted. The admission clawed its way up anyway.
"And I think about her when I shouldn't. I worry for her. I need her safe in a way that has nothing to do with Daisy and everything to do with—" I couldn't finish. Saying it aloud would make it real. Unforgivable.
I waited. For thunder. For the earth to split open with the wrongness of it. For some cosmic sign that I was betraying everything we'd built.
Instead, wind rustled through new leaves. The wildflowers swayed. And I heard Elena's voice, not as I heard it in nightmares, that scream cut short, but as it had been in life. Warm. Patient. A little exasperated at my dramatics.
"Oh, Jack. You always make things so difficult."
"It's a betrayal," I argued with a ghost, with memory, with my own conscience. "Of you. Of us. Of everything—"
"Of what? Of grief?" I could almost see her, arms crossed, one eyebrow raised the way it always was when I was being deliberately stubborn. "Grief isn't a loyalty test, love. It's a journey. And you've been stuck at the same miserable stop for two years, punishing yourself for being alive."
"She was there." The old wound throbbed. "She sat in that car while you—"
"And she's carried that 'there' every single day since. While you've been carrying anger, she's been carrying shame. You're both so weighted down you can barely stand."
Elena's voice softened, became the tone she'd used when Daisy had nightmares.
"Maybe you can help each other put the burdens down. Maybe that's the whole point—not to forget me, but to prove that the love I gave you wasn't wasted. That it taught you how to love again."
My hand trembled against the stone. The ice around my heart, two years of carefully maintained frost, cracked. Just a hairline fracture. But through it, something warm and terrifying seeped in.
Forgiveness. Not absolution. Not forgetting. But a direction. A tentative step toward living instead of existing in a memorial to loss.
I sat there and gave Elena a life update about everything that had happened in the last two years. I had been so busy plotting revenge that I postponed visiting her longer than was necessary.
“I miss you so much. But I promise to be back once Carter is no longer a threat.” I said, placing a gentle kiss on her tombstone.
I was ten minutes from home, still processing the conversation at Elena’s graveyard, when my phone erupted.
Not a ringtone. A series of shrill, overlapping alerts I'd programmed myself, the sound that only played for one thing. Security breach.
The screen lit up like a Christmas tree. Red notifications cascading:
brEACH - FRONT DOOR MOTION
- MASTER BEDROOM brEACH
- ELEVATOR FOYER SYSTEM OFFLINE
- GUEST ROOM brEACH
My body moved on its own, before I could realize what happened, I was already slamming the door shut on my car and speeding down side streets.
My hands went numb. The steering wheel suddenly felt like it was covered in ice. The car swerved before I corrected, adrenaline slamming through my system like a sledgehammer.
No. No no no no—
I jabbed at Anna's number, phone pressed to my ear with white-knuckled pressure. It rang once. Twice. Then nothing—not voicemail, not her voice, just dead, empty silence that made my stomach drop through the floor of the car.
Officer Martinez. I tried him next, fumbling with the screen, vision tunneling. Same thing. One ring. Silence. A void where security should have been.
"FUCK!" The word tore from my throat, raw and animalistic.
My foot slammed the accelerator to the floor. The engine roared. I swerved into the left lane, earning a blast of horn from a sedan.
Ran a red light, tires screaming.
Another horn, but I didn't care. I couldn't care about anything except the twelve miles between them and me.
The security app, I needed to see. My hands shook so badly I nearly dropped the phone twice before getting it propped on the dashboard.
The camera feed for the elevator foyer loaded first: door hanging open, the angle wrong.
Living room camera: static image, frozen mid-chaos. An overturned side table. Something dark on the white carpet that my brain refused to identify.
I don't remember the rest of the drive. Every second was a lifetime. Every red light, a torture. My mind kept supplying images I couldn't stop: Daisy's terrified face. Anna fighting. Blood.
Please. Please let them be okay. God, please—
A prayer from a man who hadn't prayed since Elena's funeral.
I don't remember parking. Don't remember sprinting across the garage or jabbing the elevator button with shaking fingers. The ride up was silent except for my own ragged breathing fogging the mirrored walls.
Thirty-fourth floor. The elevator chimed, and the doors slid open.
The penthouse door was ajar.
Just slightly. Six inches. Enough to see a slice of the foyer beyond; overturned mail, shoe rack askew.
The silence that greeted me was the most terrifying sound I'd ever heard.
Not Daisy's humming. Not Anna's soft voice. Not Mrs. Rosa's telenovela in the background or the distant clatter of dishes.
Nothing.
The absence of life was brutal.
"ANNA!" My voice cracked, raw and desperate. "DAISY!"
The echo that came back mocked me.
I pushed through the door, and the scene in the living room hit me like a physical impact.
The vase of tulips, those cursed tulips, shattered on the floor, water spreading in a dark stain across the white carpet. Petals scattered like drops of blood. A dining chair on its side, one leg broken. And Officer Martinez sprawled near the kitchen threshold.
I was at his side in seconds, two fingers pressed to his neck. There was a strong pulse, thank God. A dark bruise was already flowering at his temple, an egg-sized lump where someone had hit him hard and precisely.
"Daisy!" I yelled again, my voice breaking. "DAISY, WHERE ARE YOU?"
Nothing. Just that terrible, empty silence.
I ran down the hall, my feet pounding against the hardwood, echoing in the empty apartment. Her door, which was always closed when she napped, was wide open. And inside...
The bed was rumpled, covers thrown back. Her stuffed dog, Mr. Bounces, the one she never went anywhere without, lay abandoned on the floor.
And the window. The window I had personally checked with Vance, the one with the new sensor and the lock, and every fucking expensive precaution money could buy—
Open.
Fresh, cool breeze billowed the curtains inward, making them dance like ghosts. And on the white-painted sill, stark and horrifying and undeniable—
Blood.
Not a lot. A smear, maybe two inches long. Crimson against white.