Chapter 8 - Lily's RoomThe voice came again.
“Daniel.”
Cole raised his weapon.
“Show yourself.”
Nothing.
Then the emergency lights came on.
Nobody stood on the stairs.
My sister was crying upstairs.
Emma was holding her.
I ran to them.
“Are you okay?”
My sister nodded.
Emma was trembling.
“Daddy…”
“I’m here.”
“The man talked like Uncle Michael.”
I remembered the voice.
My dead brother.
Exactly.
Someone had used a recording.
Cole searched the house.
He found a speaker hidden inside the wall.
“Voice manipulation,” he said.
“Why use my brother?”
“To scare you.”
“It worked.”
He didn't argue.
We moved Emma to a hotel.
That night, I read Claire's notebook.
Most pages were coded.
But one name appeared repeatedly.
Adrian Vale.
Another:
Martin Crowe.
And another:
Lily Harris.
Claire had been investigating them together.
The deeper I read, the stranger it became.
There were diagrams of houses.
Camera locations.
Doorways.
Ventilation systems.
Emergency exits.
This wasn't casual spying.
These houses had been mapped.
Studied.
Used.
Then I found a page titled:
THE GIRLS
Lily.
Emma.
Two others.
Sophie.
Maya.
Four children.
Different families.
Same age range.
Same surveillance pattern.
Next to each name was one word:
WITNESS.
I called Cole.
“What did they witness?”
“That's what we're finding out.”
He arrived before midnight.
Together we decoded the next section.
A handwritten note:
The children don't remember the event. They remember the warning.
“What warning?” I asked.
Cole looked at Emma sleeping.
“Maybe that's why she keeps saying ‘monster.’”
We investigated Lily's old bedroom using archived photographs.
A mirror.
A stuffed animal.
A wooden toy box.
A ceiling vent.
Everything looked normal.
Then Claire's notebook gave us another clue.
THE GIRLS WERE NEVER THE TARGET.
I stared at the sentence.
“What?”
“The girls witnessed something.”
“Then what was the target?”
Cole flipped the page.
A photograph fell out.
Four men stood outside a warehouse.
One was Adrian Vale.
One was Martin Crowe.
One was a man whose face had been scratched out.
The fourth was Daniel.
Me.
I dropped the photograph.
“No.”
Cole looked at it.
“That's you.”
“I've never been there.”
“Do you remember anything?”
“No.”
The date was six years ago.
Before Emma was born.
Before Claire died.
Before I moved into the house.
I couldn't breathe.
Then I remembered something.
A business trip.
A warehouse.
A meeting I couldn't fully remember.
My brother Michael had called me that night.
He said:
“Don't go.”
I had gone anyway.
I just couldn't remember why.
Suddenly the memories came back in fragments.
Concrete floor.
A metal door.
A little girl crying.
Someone shouting.
Then darkness.
I sat down.
Cole stared at me.
“Daniel, what happened there?”
“I don't know.”
He turned the photograph over.
There was one final sentence.
Daniel saw them first.
I felt sick.
“Why don't I remember?”
Cole answered quietly.
“Maybe you were drugged.”
“By who?”
The hotel room door suddenly rattled.
Emma woke up.
My sister gasped.
Cole drew his weapon.
A paper slid underneath the door.
No footsteps.
Nobody outside.
The paper contained one sentence.
ASK DANIEL ABOUT THE NIGHT THE CHILDREN DISAPPEARED.
I stared at it.
Then Emma spoke from the bed.
“Daddy.”
“What?”
She pointed toward the closet.
“There is a man in there.”
Cole opened it.
Empty.
Then the closet wall moved.
A hidden compartment.
Inside was an old recorder.
Cole pressed play.
My own voice came through.
Six years younger.
Terrified.
“Take me instead.”
Then another voice answered.
Adrian Vale.
“You don't understand.”
And a child's voice whispered:
“Daddy?”
The recording stopped.
I looked at Emma.
She looked at me.
May you like
Then she said:
“That was my voice.”
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