Chapter 11 - THE MAN FROM THE PAST
I drove frantically toward the address where Emily and Mason were staying. Every red light felt like torture. Every second stretched like an hour.
Sophia’s words echoed in my mind. The man her mother ran away from… he’s finally found her.
Who was he? What did he want? And how had Sophia known him? Had she contacted him? Had she led him straight to Emily?
My phone rang. Emily’s name.
I answered immediately. “Emily! Are you all right?”
“Daniel,” she breathed. Her voice was shaking, barely above a whisper. “Someone is here. Watching the house. A man in a dark car. He’s been parked across the street since we arrived. And he… he just looked up at the window. Daniel… he looked exactly like the photograph of my father.”
My grip tightened on the phone until my knuckles ached. “Your father? The man you never knew?”
“Yes. The one Clara left. The one she said was dangerous. Daniel… he’s found us.”
“Stay inside,” I commanded, swerving around a slow-moving truck. “Lock every door. Close every curtain. Do not answer the door no matter what. I’m ten minutes away. Do you hear me? Ten minutes. Stay inside.”
“I’m afraid, Daniel,” she whispered. “He knows my name. He called out to me from the street. He called me by a name I haven’t heard since I was a little girl. A name… that isn’t Emily.”
My stomach dropped. “What name?”
“Elena,” she said. “He called me Elena.”
The line went dead.
“Emily!” I shouted into the phone. “Emily!”
Silence.
I slammed the phone onto the passenger seat and pressed my foot harder against the gas. The car roared forward. I was five minutes away. Four. Three.
I skidded to a halt in front of the house. The street was quiet. No dark car. No man standing on the lawn. But the front door stood open.
I leaped out of the car and ran up the steps.
“Emily! Mason!”
I burst inside. The living room was empty. The curtains were torn down. Furniture overturned. A glass lay shattered on the floor.
And on the wall, pinned to the center of the empty space where a painting once hung, was a single piece of paper. Handwritten in bold, angry script.
*“She belongs to me. Just like her mother did. Come to Blackwood Falls if you want her back.”*
My knees buckled. I grabbed the wall to stay standing.
Blackwood Falls. The name from the newspaper. The place where Clara Bennett had died forty years ago. The place where this man—this stranger who was Emily’s real father—was taking my wife and child.
I pulled out my phone and called the police. I gave them everything. The description. The location. The destination. But as I spoke, I knew—they would take hours. By the time they organized a search party, got units up there… it would be too late.
I ended the call and stood in the wreckage of the room. Emily was gone. Mason was gone. Taken by a man who believed he had a right to them. A man who had been searching for decades. And Sophia—she had known. She had told him exactly where to find them. She had handed my family over to a monster from the past.
Rage burned through me so hot it felt like it would consume me. I thought of Emily—afraid, confused, discovering that her entire life had been built on a stolen name. I thought of Mason—terrified, torn from his mother’s arms.
I walked back out to my car. I opened the passenger door and reached inside. I pulled out the journal and the newspaper clipping. I flipped to the back page. Scrawled in the very last entry, written in a shaky, hurried hand:
*“If he returns… he will take them to the old cabin at Blackwood Falls. Near the reservoir. Where it all happened. Stop him there. Stop him before history repeats itself.”*
May you like
I stuffed everything into the glovebox and slammed the door. I started the engine, gripped the wheel until my hands ached, and turned the car toward the highway.
Blackwood Falls. I was coming. And whatever waited for me there—whatever truth, whatever danger, whatever darkness—I would face it. I would bring them home. Or I would die trying.
