…twin six-year-olds were sound asleep in their beds, their chests rising and falling in a steady rhythm. But Chloe wasn’t reading Pride and Prejudice.<\/p>\n
She was standing in the center of the room, illuminated only by the pale moonlight filtering through the blinds. She had peeled back the corner of the heavy wool rug and was silently prying up a loose floorboard\u2014one I hadn’t even known existed in our hundred-year-old house. Beside her sat a sleek, heavy-duty lockbox.<\/p>\n
I held my breath, my knuckles turning white as I gripped the doorframe. Chloe reached deep into the dark cavity under the floor and pulled out a stack of weathered manila folders. I recognized the faded red stamp on the top edge instantly. It was my wife’s maiden name, followed by a string of numbers I couldn’t decipher.<\/p>\n
Before I could push the door open and demand an explanation, Chloe\u2019s phone illuminated her face with a harsh white glow. She answered it on the first ring. When she spoke, her sweet, teenage cadence was completely gone. Her voice dropped into a sharp, commanding, and distinctly adult tone.<\/p>\n
“I have the secondary files,” she whispered coldly. “The husband is entirely clueless, but they just pulled into the driveway early. Initiate extraction protocol.”<\/p>\n
I took a panicked step backward, and the floorboard beneath my heel let out a deafening shriek.<\/p>\n
Chloe\u2019s head snapped toward the crack in the door. The innocent, bookish babysitter vanished in an instant. The calculating, dead-eyed stare that locked onto mine belonged to someone who had done this a hundred times before. She didn’t scream. She didn’t scramble to hide the folders.<\/p>\n
She just smiled, reached into her oversized knit cardigan, and pulled out something metallic that glinted in the dark.<\/p>\n
“Correction,” she said to the person on the phone, never breaking eye contact with me. “Looks like extraction is going to be messy.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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