Part 2: The Secret in the Blood

They found us. I thought thirty years of hiding in the dirt would make them forget, but the bloodline never forgets. A man named Vance called the landline today. He knows about Louis. He knows about his job in Buckhead. He said if I don’t pay the ‘ancestral debt’ by the end of the year, they won’t just ruin Louis’s career—they will make sure he suffers the same fate his mother did. My heart is failing me. I don’t have the strength to fight them anymore.”

My breath hitched. Ancestral debt? Who was Vance?

I frantically turned to the next page. The entry was dated just four days ago—the day before Mr. Raymond came to my apartment to ask for the twenty thousand dollars.

“The doctor told me I need a twenty-thousand-dollar surgery to live. But Vance called again. He demanded twenty thousand dollars by Friday, or his men will visit Louis at his office. I don’t need the money for surgery. I am going to ask Louis for a loan. I will pretend it is for my heart. If he gives it to me, I will hand it over to Vance and take the secret to my grave. If he refuses… God have mercy on my son, because I cannot protect him from what is coming.”

The blood rushed out of my face. The room seemed to spin.

The $20,000 wasn’t for a medical bill. He had used the medical diagnosis as a cover story to extort the money from me to pay off a dangerous syndicate that was targeting me.

But I hadn’t given him the cash. I had bypassed him entirely and paid the hospital directly.

Which meant… Vance never got his money.

And today was Friday.

The Uninvited Guest
My phone suddenly vibrated violently in my pocket, shattering the silence of the empty room. The caller ID showed my wife’s name.

With trembling hands, I pressed the answer button. “Sarah? Thank god. Listen to me, you need to call hospital security right now—”

“Louis?”

The voice on the other end wasn’t Sarah’s. It was a deep, gravelly, and entirely unfamiliar male voice. It possessed a cold, chilling calmness that made every hair on my arms stand up.

“Who is this?” I demanded, my voice cracking with absolute terror. “Where is my wife? Where is my father?”

“Your father is currently resting very comfortably in his post-op bed,” the voice replied smoothly. “And your lovely wife is sitting right next to me, holding my hand. She’s a bit shaken, but otherwise unharmed. For now.”

In the background, I heard a muffled, terrified whimper. It was Sarah.

“What do you want?” I screamed into the phone, slamming my fist against the wooden crate. “I’ll give you whatever you want! Just don’t touch them!”

“Mr. Hernandez—oh, excuse me, you go by your mother’s name, don’t you? Mr. Louis,” the man chuckled darkly. “Your father tried very hard to protect you. He played his part perfectly. But unfortunately, you tried to be a good son by paying the hospital directly instead of giving the old man the cash we explicitly demanded.”

“I have money!” I yelled, tears of panic streaming down my face as I dashed out of the room toward my car. “I make over a hundred thousand a year! I can get you twenty thousand dollars right now! Just tell me where to bring it!”

The man on the line let out a low, mocking laugh that sent a shiver straight to my core.

“Twenty thousand dollars? Oh, Louis. That was the price for your father’s silence. That was just the interest on a debt that has been compounding for thirty years. Now that we’ve had to come all the way down here to collect it ourselves, the price has gone up significantly.”

I threw myself into the driver’s seat, started the car, and tore out of the gravel driveway, the tires screaming against the pavement. “What do you want?!”

“I want you to look out your front windshield, Louis,” the voice said quietly.

I slammed on the brakes.

Blocking the narrow dirt road leading away from the riverbank was a massive, black luxury SUV with tinted windows. The headlights flashed once.

The phone call didn’t disconnect, but the voice now echoed from both the speaker in my hand and a figure stepping out of the passenger side of the SUV. The man was dressed in a pristine gray suit that looked completely out of place in the slums of Savannah. He held a phone to his ear, smiling directly at me through my windshield.

“The debt your mother’s family owes us isn’t measured in dollars, Louis,” the man said into the phone, his smile widening into a terrifying grin. “It’s measured in blood. And since your father ran out of his a long time ago… we’ve come to collect yours. Step out of the car. If you try to reverse, the man standing in your wife’s hospital room gets the signal to end it.”

My hand froze on the gear shift. Through the tinted glass of the SUV’s rear window, I could see the silhouette of a second man raising a suppressed firearm, pointed directly at my chest.

I was trapped. And the clock had just run out.

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