Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 202

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Chapter 202

Lucia was sitting on the bedroom floor when her phone lit up.

She had been there for hours. Back against the bed frame, knees pulled to her chest, staring at nothing. The room was dark. She hadn’t turned on a light. Somewhere down the hall Alexander was still on the phone, his voice a low steady murmur that she couldn’t make herself follow anymore. Four days of phone calls and meetings and leads that dissolved into nothing. Four days of her daughters in that basement getting thinner and colder and more frightened while she sat in rooms and waited.

She looked at the screen.

Unknown number. An attachment.

Her chest locked before the image even loaded.

It came through slowly. Monica first. She was in a wooden chair, wrists bound behind her back, ankles tied. Her head was turned slightly away from the camera. Her face was thin. Her hair was tangled and dirty and pressed flat against one side from sleeping on a hard surface. And on her cheek, rising purple and dark against her skin, was a bruise the size of a hand.

Someone had hit her daughter’s face.

Lucia pressed her fist against her mouth. The sound that came out of her anyway was not a word and not a cry. It was something below both.

The second image loaded.

Lena. Same chair, same ropes, her chin lifted, her wrists raw and red where the rope had rubbed the skin away. Her eyes were fixed on whoever held the camera and they were red from crying and exhausted to the bone and still, still trying to be defiant. Still trying. Even now.

Lucia could not breathe. The room had stopped working the way rooms were supposed to work. The walls felt wrong. The floor felt wrong. Everything felt like it was tilting toward some edge she could not see.

“Lucia.”

She looked up. Alexander was in the doorway. She hadn’t heard him come. He crossed the room in four steps and crouched in front of her and she just held out the phone. Her arm was shaking so badly the screen was vibrating.

He took it. He looked.

She watched his face while he looked at his daughter.

The change that moved through him started in his jaw and moved to his eyes and then became something that had no name and was not safe to look at directly. His hand tightened around the phone until his knuckles whitened. He breathed once, slowly, through his nose. Then he set the phone face up on the carpet between them and stared at it the way a man stared at something he was trying to accept as real.

Monica’s bruised face stared back at them from the carpet.

The phone buzzed.

A message. Same number. No image this time.

*You destroyed my life. Now I’m going to destroy yours.*

Lucia read it twice. Then she looked up at Alexander. “Who is this? I don’t recognise this number. I don’t know what this is. Who hates us this much?”

“Someone who has been planning this for a very long time.” His voice came out flat and stripped. “This isn’t someone who lost control. Every piece of this was arranged.”

“But who?” Lucia pressed both hands flat on the carpet, needing something solid under her palms. “Who planned this? Who watched my daughters long enough to know their schedule, their bodyguards, their

moment?” routines? Who sat in a car outside that mail wo

Successfully unlocked!

The phone buzzed again.

that helped.

*Something special is coming. A video. Watch for it tomorrow night.*

Lucia stared at those words. Her mind tried to build an image of what kind of person sent messages like this and she stopped herself because she could feel where that thought was going and she could not go there tonight.

She was still staring at the screen when it buzzed a third time.

An address.

She read it. Warehouse district. East side of the city. Street name and building number.

She was on her feet before she finished reading.

“Lucia.” Alexander’s voice carried a warning.

“That’s where they are.” She was already moving toward the wardrobe, pulling out shoes, her hands shaking so badly she could barely work the laces.

“It could be a trap. It could be nothing. It could be designed to pull us out of the house in the middle of the night while something else happens.”

“Or my daughters are sleeping on a concrete floor in that building right now.” She looked at him across the room, her eyes dry and her voice completely certain. “I am not calling the police and waiting two hours for them to process this. I am not sitting in this house for one more night. I am going to that address.” Something moved through Alexander’s expression. He looked at her for a long moment, this woman he loved standing in the dark with her shoes half tied and four days of grief carved into her face.

“We go first,” he said. “Just us. No sirens. No police presence. We look at the location and if there is any sign of the girls we call everyone. But we do not arrive with lights and noise and give whoever this is a reason to hurt them before we get inside.”

They drove across the city in silence. The streets were empty at three in the morning, dark and indifferent, the city going on without caring what was happening inside it. Lucia watched the buildings change through the passenger window, her hand pressed flat against her sternum the whole way, pressing against the thing inside her chest that would not stop pulling.

Alexander killed the headlights half a block from the address.

The building was large and old and silent. Broken windows in the upper floors. A rusted loading door pulled halfway down. No cars. No light from inside. No sound at all except the wind moving through the broken glass somewhere above.

Lucia pushed through the side door before Alexander could reach for it.

Inside smelled of rust and damp and decades of abandonment. Their footsteps sounded enormous in the silence. The darkness was almost complete except for something faint and flickering coming from deeper

inside.

A light.

They moved toward it.

It was a television. Small, sitting on a metal folding table in the center of an otherwise completely empty room. A generator hummed on the floor beside it, its cable running to the screen. The image on the television was live or very close to live. Lucia could tell by the quality of it, the specific graininess of something streaming rather than recorded.

Monica and Lena. Same chairs. Same ropes. Monica’s head was dropped against Lena’s shoulder, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow. Lena’s eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling above them, her jaw set and her expression the particular kind of empty that came from exhaustion so deep it had stopped feeling like anything.

Chapter 202

Lucia stepped toward the screen.

She pressed her hand flat against it, against her daughter’s face, against the image of Lena staring at a ceiling she could see and not reach.

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