Chapter 2
We moved everyone away from the vehicle.
No heroics.
No one crawling underneath it.
My garage specialist arrived and examined the car from a safe distance.
After several minutes, he looked at me.
“Someone tampered with multiple systems.”
“Enough to cause an accident?”
He hesitated.
“Enough that I wouldn’t start it.”
Good answer.
Then:
“There’s also something attached beneath the rear section that doesn’t belong there.”
Ruth sat on a padded bench.
Her face had gone pale.
Damien stared at the floor.
I turned toward him.
“You knew?”
“No.”
Sloane laughed bitterly.
“He knew part.”
Damien looked at her.
“Shut up.”
Useful.
“What part?”
Sloane crossed her arms.
“We were told to disable the car.”
“Who?”
Silence.
“To make me miss the meeting?”
“Yes.”
“Why lock Ruth up?”
Damien answered this time.
“She recognized the work wasn’t normal.”
Ruth snorted.
“You cut lines on a boss’s car and expected me to think you were changing the oil?”
Damien flinched.
I stepped closer.
“What did you think was happening?”
He finally admitted it.
Someone ordered him to make sure my car could not complete the downtown trip.
No explosion.
No death.
Just failure on the road.
Then another vehicle would collect me.
“Whose?”
He shook his head.
“You don’t know?”
“I was told a security team would take over.”
That was worse.
He had helped manufacture a roadside vulnerability without even asking who planned to arrive afterward.
Sloane looked at him with open contempt.
“Tell him the rest.”
Damien’s face tightened.
“What rest?”
“The message.”
He glared at her.
I waited.
Damien eventually removed his phone.
One deleted message had been recovered by habit through his notification history.
MAKE SURE RUTH CANNOT WARN HIM.
Then another.
IF VINCENT LEAVES THE GARAGE ALONE, PHASE TWO BEGINS.
I stared at the words.
Phase two.
Not a disabled car.
A sequence.
I looked at Sloane.
“Who sent it?”
She said nothing.
Then Ruth whispered from the bench:
“I know.”
Everyone turned.
She looked at Damien with something worse than fear.
Recognition.
“That phrase.”
May you like
Her voice trembled.
“Your father used it twenty years ago.”
