Chapter 3: The Woman in the Forest

Chapter 2: Beneath the Ashes Atlas was sedated while veterinarians examined his injured paw. The diagnosis stunned everyone. A rusted steel trap had been buried beneath loose soil inside the enclosure. Zoo-issued. Manufactured the very same year the old veterinary clinic burned down. Richard immediately ordered the enclosure excavated. Workers expected to find damaged drainage pipes. Instead, their shovels struck concrete. An underground maintenance tunnel. One that had never appeared on any official blueprint. Inside were broken cages. Old medical equipment. Stacks of forgotten files. Everything coated in years of dust. Near the tunnel's end stood a heavy steel door. Locked from the outside. When security finally forced it open, a stale breath of air escaped. The room beyond looked untouched. Shelves lined with animal treatment records. Boxes labeled with years long erased from the park's archives. Then Lily noticed something tucked beneath a cabinet. A metal case. Richard recognized it instantly. Elena's emergency field kit. Inside lay dozens of handwritten notebooks. Each page documented animals that had mysteriously disappeared from official records. Healthy wolves marked as deceased. Perfectly healthy tigers listed as terminally ill. Rare birds transferred without destination. Every entry ended with the same initials. M.H. Richard froze. Marcus Holloway. His own older brother. The former director of the wildlife park. The man who died only six months after Elena disappeared. Or so everyone believed. Lily quietly opened the notebook's final page. One sentence had been written in red ink. If you are reading this... he survived the fire. Richard's blood ran cold. Because Marcus had supposedly been buried. Yet Elena's final warning claimed otherwise. Someone officially declared dead... Might still be alive.

5 chapters