She was tiny.
Weak.
But alive.
And when they placed her against my chest, I cried harder than I had cried in that basement.
For weeks, I had believed Marcus wanted me dead.
But the truth was even darker.
He had been planning to make my death look accidental.
The cage wasn’t originally a dog cage.
It had been reinforced.
The basement drain had been cleared.
The cameras were connected to a hidden recording system.
Marcus had planned everything.
He thought when my body finally gave out, everyone would believe I had died from complications during pregnancy.
But he made one mistake.
He underestimated my sister.
She had refused to believe his story.
She contacted an investigator.
And Evelyn had secretly installed the recording equipment days before the dinner.
The dinner guests weren’t random either.
Among them were two people who had been working with investigators.
Marcus had unknowingly invited witnesses into his own house.
But there was one final twist.
Three weeks after Marcus’s arrest, Evelyn came to visit me.
She brought a folder.
“There is something you need to know,” she said.
Inside was a photograph.
It showed Marcus standing beside another woman.
A pregnant woman.
My hands went cold.
“Who is she?”
Evelyn hesitated.
“She disappeared eight years ago.”
I stared at the photograph.
The woman looked terrified.
Then Evelyn turned the photograph over.
There was a handwritten sentence.
“Marcus did this before.”
I looked at my sleeping daughter.
Suddenly, everything made sense.
I hadn’t been his first victim.
I had only been the first one who survived.
And somewhere in the evidence room, investigators had just found the old basement cage.
The same one Marcus had used years before.
This time, however, it contained something far more terrifying than a memory.
It contained a name.
A name Marcus had never mentioned.
His first wife’s.
