Chapter 8 - Daniel Without the Mask
Claire grabbed a tire iron from the trunk of her car.
Mara grabbed the cassette recorder.
Not smart weapons. Not a smart plan.
But fear did not turn them into action heroes. It made their hands sweaty and their choices fast.
Daniel stopped outside the unit.
“Mara, open the door.”
“No.”
“I’m not here to hurt you.”
Claire mouthed, He already did.
Mara almost laughed.
Daniel tried the handle.
The storage door rattled.
“You violated the protective order,” Mara said.
“You violated my family’s privacy.”
“There it is.”
“What?”
“The part where you sound like your mother.”
Silence.
Then: “Give me what you found.”
“No.”
“Mara, you don’t know what any of it means.”
“I know you tried to kill me.”
“I cut fabric.”
Claire slammed the tire iron against the inside of the door. “And if she fell thirty feet, what did you think the fabric was attached to, genius?”
Daniel swore.
The clerk shouted from the front office, “Hey! You can’t be back there!”
Daniel’s footsteps moved away.
Claire exhaled.
Too early.
A second later, something heavy struck the side wall.
Then smoke drifted under the door.
“He started a fire,” Claire said.
Mara’s mind went blank.
They had no back exit.
The smoke thickened quickly.
Claire wrapped her sleeve over her mouth. “We have to open it.”
“He’s waiting.”
“We stay, we burn.”
Another real choice. Both bad.
Mara shoved the boxes into a rolling plastic bin. Claire raised the tire iron.
“On three.”
They opened the door on two.
Daniel stood five feet away with a red fire extinguisher in his hands.
The smoke came from a burning pile of cardboard near the corridor entrance.
He sprayed the extinguisher into Claire’s face.
She screamed and dropped the tire iron.
Daniel lunged for the bin.
Mara hit him with the cassette recorder.
It cracked against his cheek.
He stared at her, shocked.
She had never hit him before.
Neither had she expected to.
Then he shoved her.
Not hard enough to knock her down.
Hard enough to make her stumble backward into a metal shelf.
Pain tore across her belly.
Daniel froze.
For one second, he looked horrified by what he had done.
Then he grabbed the banker box anyway.
That was the moment Mara stopped wondering whether some good version of Daniel was trapped underneath.
He ran.
Claire coughed on the floor.
Mara reached down between her legs.
Her fingers came away wet.
Not blood this time.
Clear fluid.
Her water had broken.
May you like
Eight weeks early.
