The phone vibrating in my pocket felt like a countdown to execution. I didn’t need to look. I already knew the message.
I already knew the photo that would come with it—my sister, Ava, tied to a chair in some filthy basement, fear carved into her face in a way no sixteen-year-old should ever wear.
Forty-eight hours. Six hundred thousand dollars. Or we send her back piece by piece.
I stood in the service alley behind the Blackspire Tower while icy rain soaked through my thin server uniform. My hands shook, not from the cold, but from the reality crushing my lungs. I had sixty-three dollars to my name. A waitress. A nobody. And the men my father borrowed from before he vanished had decided Ava was payment.
