Chapter 6 - The Ransom Demand
The kitchen island seemed to spin beneath my hands as I stared at the terrifying note.
Brent had crossed the line from corporate fraud into outright kidnapping.
Marcus immediately reached for his phone to call the FBI, but I snatched the device from his hand.
If Brent was desperate enough to abduct his own niece and nephew, he was desperate enough to hurt them.
My personal cell phone buzzed in my coat pocket with an encrypted text message.
It was a live video link from an unknown number.
I clicked the link, my breath catching in my throat as the grainy footage loaded.
Emma and Noah were sitting on a dirty mattress inside what looked like an abandoned shipping container.
They looked terrified, holding hands and shivering in the cold.
Brent stepped into the frame, holding a heavy steel crowbar and smiling directly into the camera.
He told me the gambling syndicate was demanding two million dollars by midnight, or they were going to kill him.
He demanded I sign over the remaining assets in my retirement accounts to him immediately.
If I transferred the money, he promised to text me the GPS coordinates of the shipping container.
I had exactly three hours to liquidate my entire life's work.
Marcus looked at the screen, his face pale with absolute horror.
He told me the bank would never authorize a two-million-dollar wire transfer on a holiday weekend.
I realized with sickening clarity that Brent didn't actually care if I could get the money or not.
He was just buying time to escape the country, leaving my children locked in that container to freeze.
I closed the video link and opened a tracking application I had secretly installed on Emma's smartwatch months ago.
I had completely forgotten about the watch in the chaos of the morning.
The tiny blue dot on the digital map began to pulse, revealing their exact location.
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They were not hidden in some remote industrial park.
The GPS coordinates indicated they were locked inside the basement of my mother's supposedly foreclosed house.
