Chapter 3 - Digital Ghost
Brenda didn't flinch. Without a second thought, she stepped up to me and began aggressively patting down my oversized, torn sweater. She dug her hands into my empty pockets, roughly pulling at the fabric.
"Nothing," Brenda said, stepping back. "You probably left it in the kitchen when you were screaming at Toby."
Marcus swore under his breath, rubbing his forehead. "Whatever. Check the kitchen, Toby. I want to stream the night feed in ten minutes. The subscribers are waiting."
As the two men turned and retreated down the hallway, Brenda gave me one last, fleeting glance. It wasn't a look of sympathy; it was a look of shared peril. We were two prisoners in the same trap, only one of us was wearing the chains.
The moment the door clicked shut, I moved.
My swollen, bruised fingers reached back into the torn foam of the sofa cushion. I pulled the phone out. The screen was still dimly lit. My heart hammered. 11:42 PM. Battery at 14%.
I didn't try to call 911. I knew how these remote rural properties worked. If a police siren approached down the two-mile gravel driveway, Marcus would hear it five minutes before they arrived. He would put a bullet in my head, throw my body in the basement pit, and claim he’d never seen me.
I needed an airtight trail. I needed a ghost in his machine.
Unlocking the phone, I navigated straight to the system settings, just as Brenda had hinted. I opened the notes app. There, saved under a mundane title—Truck Specs—was a list of IP addresses, cloud login credentials, and passcodes.
Using my shaking thumb, I tapped into his cloud storage settings. I enabled real-time auto-sync over cellular data. Every video file, every graphic photograph he had taken of me over the past four months—drinking contaminated toilet water while chained to the floor, my swollen pregnant stomach showing through rags, the chemical burns on my ankles—began uploading to an offsite secure cloud server.
Then, I opened his social messaging apps.
My fingers flew across the keyboard. I didn't send a message to the local sheriff. Instead, I sent an encrypted broadcast message containing the live tracking link and cloud access keys directly to the FBI’s regional cyber-crime tipline and three major national investigative news desks in Chicago.
Subject: Ongoing Abduction, Torture, and Human Trafficking. Live Stream Active.
I pasted the GPS coordinates hard-coded into the phone's location services.
Latitude: 41.8781° N, Longitude: -87.6298° W. An abandoned slaughterhouse property on the outskirts of Kankakee County.
Just as the progress bar hit 98%, footsteps echoed down the hall.
"Found it! It was on the fridge, you idiot!" Toby’s voice boomed from the kitchen.
Wait. If Toby found Marcus’s phone on the fridge... what was I holding?
My blood turned to ice. I looked at the sleek metal casing of the phone in my hands. This wasn't Marcus’s primary phone. This was the burner unit—the master control hub used to stream to the dark web network.
May you like
The door swung open. Marcus stood in the frame, holding his personal iPhone in one hand, his face pale with sudden, terrifying realization. He looked at his hands, then looked directly at me holding the black burner device.
"You bitch," Marcus roared, his voice cracking with rage.
