“Take me to her,” Daniel choked out, ignoring the relentless rain soaking through his expensive wool coat.
The little girl nodded, her small, icy hand slipping into his. She led him away from the glittering, neon-soaked avenues and deep into the city’s forgotten, rotting underbelly. The streetlights flickered and died as they stopped before a dilapidated tenement building, its windows boarded up like dead eyes.
“She’s in there,” the girl whispered, pointing a trembling finger. “Top floor. Room 4B. Please hurry.”
Daniel didn’t hesitate. He burst through the entrance, sprinting up the decaying, pitch-black stairs, his pulse pounding a frantic rhythm in his ears. *Sarah. After twenty years.* He threw his weight against the peeling door of 4B, expecting a sterile sickbed. Expecting to finally see his sister’s face.
The apartment was dead empty.
No bed. No medicine. Just a single wooden chair in the center of the dusty floor. Resting on it was a burner phone, its screen glaring brightly in the shadows.
A cold dread—sharper than the freezing rain—pierced Daniel’s chest.
*Clack.*
The heavy steel deadbolt slid into place behind him. Daniel spun around. Through the grimy peephole, he saw the little girl in the hallway. She wasn’t shivering anymore. She stood perfectly straight, an icy, calculating smirk replacing her fragile innocence. She casually tossed his own black leather wallet—the one he hadn’t realized she’d picked from his coat—into the air and caught it.
The burner phone rang.
Daniel answered it with a shaking hand. “Hello?”
“Hello, Danny,” a woman’s voice purred. Hardened, cold, but unmistakably Sarah’s.
“Sarah? What is this? Who is that kid?”
“Oh, she’s a prodigy. Worth every penny,” Sarah laughed, a sharp, metallic sound. “Did you really think you could steal the family inheritance and leave me for dead, brother?”
Before Daniel could breathe, the timer on the phone’s screen flipped from *00:03* to *00:02*.