Chapter 1 - The Blood in the Foyer
The rain over Atlanta hadn't stopped by the time my tires skidded against the familiar concrete of my own driveway. It was 6:14 AM. The sky was the color of bruised iron, offering no real dawn, just a lighter shade of gray. The house—a two-story colonial I had spent the last five years renovating—looked entirely alien to me now.
Marcus’s black Ford F-150 was parked at a sharp, aggressive angle on the lawn, the driver's side door still hanging open. The rain was pooling in the tire ruts. He had taken Emily to the hospital, just as he said he would, leaving the front door of my home slightly ajar.
I cut the engine, the sudden silence inside the cabin ringing in my ears. I didn't bother grabbing an umbrella or my bags. I simply walked through the downpour, my clothes instantly soaking through, my heart hammering a frantic, violent rhythm against my ribs.
“There is something inside the hallway you need to see first.”
Marcus’s voice echoed in my head. He was a man who had seen crime scenes that would break an ordinary person’s mind. For him to sound that shaken... I shoved the front door open.
The immediate smell hit me before the visual did. It was a heavy, metallic copper scent, mixed with the sharp, chemical odor of industrial bleach. The entryway was dark, the power seemingly cut, but the gray morning light filtering through the sidelights was enough to illuminate the nightmare.
The hardwood floor I had meticulously installed two summers ago was completely ruined. Dark, smeared drag marks painted a gruesome trail from the kitchen doorway down the center of the hall. But it wasn't just the blood that made my breath catch in my throat. It was the walls.
Deep, aggressive gouges tore through the drywall, as if a wild animal had desperately clawed its way toward the front door. And there, sitting squarely in the middle of the hallway, was a pristine, untouched beige suitcase. Claire’s suitcase. The monogrammed leather tag dangled innocently over a massive pool of coagulating crimson.
I stepped over the threshold, my wet shoes squeaking against the dry patches of wood. I followed the drag marks. They didn't lead out the door; they led into the living room.
The heavy Persian rug had been rolled back. The floorboards beneath the coffee table—an area I knew for a fact was solid foundation—had been pried up with a crowbar, revealing a dark, gaping void in the subfloor. I didn't know we had a crawlspace there. I was a structural engineer. I knew every inch of this house. Or I thought I did.
I grabbed the heavy Maglite flashlight I kept by the coat rack, flicked it on, and aimed the beam down into the hole.
At the bottom of the makeshift pit lay a man. He was in his late forties, dressed in a black tactical sweater and dark jeans. His throat had been slashed with horrifying precision, but his right hand was completely mangled, his fingers broken backward. He was dead. Cold and stiff.
May you like
But it was what he was clutching in his left hand that made the room spin. It was a framed photograph of Emily and me, taken at the Georgia Aquarium last year. A thick, black permanent marker had been used to cross out my face.
Someone hadn't just broken in. Someone had been living beneath the floorboards of my home.
