The silence of a house at 3:00 a.m. is never truly silent. It hums. It creaks. But tonight, there was a new sound: a faint, rhythmic hiss coming from the vents. It was a sound that made the hair on my arms stand up. I sat on the edge of the bed, my bare feet touching the cold hardwood, listening to the heavy thud of Mark’s footsteps in the basement below. He thought I was upstairs, lost in a chemically induced haze. He didn’t know I was watching the security feed on my phone, watching him stand next to the main gas line with a wrench in his hand and a look of cold, calculated focus.
He wasn’t just my husband anymore. He was a stranger wearing a mask of the man I loved, and he was about to turn our home into my tomb. I knew I had to move. If I stayed in the bedroom, I was a sitting duck. But if I ran out the front door, he’d hear me, and I didn’t know if he was armed. I grabbed my father’s old, heavy brass letter opener from the nightstand. It wasn’t much, but it felt solid in my hand.
I crept into the hallway, moving only when the house groaned to mask my footsteps. The smell of gas was getting stronger now, mixing with that strange, bitter almond scent I’d noticed earlier. I reached the top of the basement stairs. The door was cracked open just an inch. A sliver of light spilled out, and with it, the sound of a voice.
“Is it done?”
It was a woman’s voice. Chloe. She was down there with him.
“Almost,”
Mark replied, his voice echoing against the concrete walls.
“I’ve loosened the coupling on the water heater line. One spark from the pilot light when it kicks on in 20 minutes, and this whole place goes up. The fire department will call it a tragic accident. Depressed widow, faulty appliances. It’s a clean sweep.”
“And the specialist?”
Chloe asked.
“Dr. Aerys is already waiting at the hotel,”
Mark said.
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