But my daughter couldn't see me. Couldn't hear me.
All she could see was my mutilated body on the floor.
And Marlin's twisted, monstrous face, a knife still clutched in his hand.
She screamed. The family portrait she'd painted at kindergarten slipped from her fingers, hitting the ground alongside her little bunny sippy cup.
She spun around to run, but Marlin snatched her up by the arm.
She wailed, terrified, and he backhanded her across the face.
"Shut up, you little brat!"
"You and your mother are both useless trash. If either of you had been worth a damn, your daddy wouldn't have gone after my wife!"
He hit her so hard that several of her baby teeth, already loose, flew from her mouth.
My soul screamed. I clawed at him, kicked at him, hysterical, throwing everything I had against his body.
He'd killed me so fast. So fast that only now was the reality catching up to me.
"Let go! Let go of my daughter!"
"Kevin and Cassandra are the ones who wronged you! Why are you taking it out on me and my little girl?"
"Go kill them! Kill THEM!"
My fury must have bled through somehow, because a faint, cold draft stirred through the room.
Marlin set the child down. She'd already wet herself from fear. He looked in my direction and smiled.
"Miriam, I just thought of a much more interesting game."
Then he grabbed my daughter and lashed her to a dining chair with rope. He stuffed layers of socks from the balcony into her mouth until her small face turned scarlet and she couldn't make a sound.
After that, he opened the refrigerator and emptied it completely. Every last scrap of food. Not a crumb of hope left behind.
When he was finished, he picked up my phone again and typed out a text to Kevin.
"Honey, something came up! Lily and I are visiting family. We won't be back for a week!"
"Don't bother coming home either! Go take care of whatever you need to. Come back next Monday and I'll have a surprise waiting for you!"
Marlin finished typing and waved the screen in front of my corpse's face.
"Let's make a bet, Miriam."
"I'm betting that your husband reads this message and either figures out something's wrong and rushes back to save your daughter..."
"...or spends another week tangled up with my wife, and comes home just in time to collect two bodies."
When he sent that text, a small measure of relief settled over me.
Because he'd made a fatal mistake.
I had no family to visit.
Kevin and I had both grown up in an orphanage until we were twelve. Then the Henson family found him and brought him back, and overnight he became the young heir to a fortune.
On our wedding day, he'd wanted to make sure I wouldn't feel that absence. He'd hired an entire AI team to reconstruct the faces of parents I'd never met, modeled from my own features. He'd used holographic projections to let them walk me down the aisle.
My soul drifted toward the window and looked down.
Kevin's car was already at the front gate of our complex.
The moment he saw the words "visiting family," he would know something was wrong. He had to. At the very least, he'd come upstairs to check. Even if it meant a confrontation with Marlin, my daughter would have a chance. She wouldn't be left to starve to death, bound to a chair in this apartment.
But the second Kevin read the message, he tapped the screen dark.
"Miriam says she's taking the kid to visit family for a week." He hooked a finger under Cassandra's chin and pulled her into a long, deep kiss, his eyes still burning with unspent desire. "You insatiable little thing. Looks like I'm all yours this week."
He didn't even stop to wonder where "family" was.
