Trembling, I answered. I didn’t say a word, just pressed the cold plastic of the burner phone to my ear, listening to the hollow static of the connection.
“Maddie,” a voice whispered.
The sound punched the air straight out of my lungs. It was a voice I had eulogized. A voice I had heard in my tear-soaked dreams for three agonizing years.
“Elena?” I choked out, my knees instantly giving way. I slid down a stack of cardboard boxes, the concrete floor cold against my skin. “How… I buried you. I watched them lower the casket.”
“You buried a Jane Doe whose dental records I swapped,” Elena replied, her words clipping together with frantic, terrified speed. “I am so sorry, Mads. I didn’t have a choice. But you need to listen to me carefully. You cannot go back to your house.”
“Why are you calling from my house?” My mind was spinning, trying to process the impossibility of the moment. “What money? Elena, what did you do?”
“The people I stole from to pay off Dad’s debts. I thought three years was enough time. I thought the trail was cold. I snuck into your house today to get the backup drive I hid in your air vents, but they were waiting. I’m calling from your kitchen landline. I locked myself in the pantry, but they’re breaking down the front door.”
A loud, splintering crash echoed through the receiver, followed by a man’s muffled shout in the background—in my living room.
“Elena, get out of there! Call the police!” I screamed into the phone.
“I can’t,” she panted, the sound of tearing wood echoing over the line. “But the text you just got… that phone you’re holding. It’s not just a phone. It has the encryption key for the offshore accounts. They pinged it the second it powered on. They know exactly where you are.”
My heart hammered violently against my ribs. I looked up at the roll-up metal door of my storage unit. The heavy silence of the facility was suddenly broken by the aggressive screech of tires on the pavement outside. Headlights swept across the frosted glass windows at the end of the hallway.
“Maddie, listen to me,” Elena’s voice was suddenly eerily calm—the calm of someone who had lived as a ghost. “Leave the phone on the floor. Walk out the fire exit at the back of the building. Forget I was ever alive.”
“I am not losing you twice,” I said, my knuckles turning white as I gripped the phone.
Heavy, booted footsteps began echoing down the concrete corridor outside my unit. They were methodical. Hunting.
“If you take that phone, you’re in this with me,” Elena warned, the line beginning to crackle as someone started kicking at the pantry door on her end. “There’s no going back to your normal life.”
I looked at the boxes around me—the physical remains of my grief. I had spent three years mourning a lie. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life hiding from it.
“Where do we meet?” I asked.
“Union Station. Locker 89,” she said, her voice barely a breath before the line went dead.
I shoved the burner phone deep into my coat pocket, grabbed a heavy iron crowbar from an open toolbox, and sprinted toward the glowing red EXIT sign just as the metal door to my unit began to violently rattle. My sister wasn’t dead—but if I didn’t move right now, we both would be.
