The Ghost In His House

Chapter 4:The Man Who Cooked Badly

The steel door had no handle on the inside.

Mia saw it the moment the lock began to slide. Smooth metal, no knob, no keypad. A cell built to keep things in.

“Move.” She threw herself across the room and jammed her silver pick into the gap. The door groaned against it. The pick bent, then held, for one shaking second.

"Come on," she breathed. "Come on."

She got her fingers into the c***k and pulled with everything she had. Her arms burned. The metal edge bit into her palm. Then, with a last scrape, the gap widened enough to slip through, and she fell out into the cold corridor.

The door slammed shut behind her. The pick lay bent on the floor. She was gasping.

She looked up at the black camera above the frame. The little light was still steady.

“Twenty-eight seconds left on the loop.”

She snatched up the pick, wiped the keypad with her sleeve, and ran.

She was halfway up the back stairs when she saw it.

On the third step lay a single wet footprint. A man's boot, large and heavy, with a deep zigzag tread. The water was still shining.

Mia crouched and touched it. It was cold, but not dry.

“Minutes old.” Whoever had taken the files had walked out of the basement, up these stairs, and into the house. Not through the door she had just opened but somewhere in this mansion was a second way into that room.

And the stranger had known about it before she did. She followed the prints.

They crossed the hall, passed the kitchen, and stopped at the foot of the main staircase.

Then they climbed. Mia looked up into the darkness of the second floor, where Ethan slept alone.

Her heart began to pound.

She followed them, silent as breath, one hand on her knife. At the top of the stairs, the prints turned toward his door.

His door stood open, just a few inches.

“No.” She pushed it gently with one finger.

Ethan lay on his side, one arm flung over the pillow, his face soft in the moonlight. His gun sat untouched on the nightstand. He was breathing slowly and evenly.

The room was empty of anyone else.

Mia stood in the doorway and let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding. On the carpet beside his bed, the last wet print glistened, pointed at the pillow. Then it turned away, toward the window.

The window was open a c***k. The curtain trembled in the night air.

“They stood here. They watched him sleep.”

She crossed the room without a sound and pulled the window shut. Her fingers were ice.

“Why didn't they hurt him?

What are they waiting for?”

Then Ethan stirred. He murmured something in his sleep and his hand slid across the sheets, searching.

"Mia," he mumbled, and went quiet again.

She froze. Her chest hurt.

“He said my name.” She backed out of the room, closed the door, and stood in the dark hallway with her palm pressed against her mouth.

Ethan woke up smiling, and he had no idea why. He lay in the gray morning light and tried to remember his dream. Something warm. A voice and then he smelled smoke, sharp and black, and jumped out of bed.

He ran down the stairs, two at a time. The kitchen was full of gray haze. At the stove, a small figure in an apron was waving a tea towel at a smoking pan.

"Mia?"

"Don't come in!" She coughed.

"I wanted to make you breakfast. Then I burned the eggs. Then I burned the toast, then I burned the plate."

"How do you burn a plate?"

"I don't know, Ethan. I didn't think it was possible either." He stared at her.

Her hair was coming loose, and there was flour on her cheek. She looked so miserable and so ridiculous that he burst out laughing.

"You told me last night I would cook today!"

"I said I'd cook badly, with confidence." She glared at him with wet, sparkling eyes.

"You've stolen my job."

"I'm your boss."

"Then you're fired." He laughed harder, until his ribs hurt.

She was laughing too, hiding her face in the towel. The smoke curled around them, and the burnt smell made them cough.

It was the best morning Ethan had had in six years.

Mia took a plate of blackened toast and sat across from him at the table. She hadn't slept. Her hands were still sore from the steel door.

She should have been thinking about the basement, the footprints, the note in red ink. She should have been calculating her next move.

Instead, she was watching Ethan chew his terrible toast with a perfectly straight face.

"Delicious," he said gravely.

"Liar."

"It's a bit crunchy."

"It's charcoal."

"It's artisan charcoal." He swallowed with visible effort.

"I've eaten worse. In the FBI Academy, they served us something called 'breakfast loaf.'"

Mia covered her mouth and laughed until she cried.

“This is what it feels like”, she thought, and the thought was sharp and sweet and terrible.

“This is what a normal morning feels like.”

She had dreamed about mornings like this since she was thirteen. Someone teasing her across a table, the smell of bread, nobody watching and nobody counting.

And it was all a lie, built on a stolen name and a dead girl's ID.

Her smile faltered. She looked down at her plate.

"Hey." Ethan's voice was gentle.

"What is it?"

"Nothing," she whispered.

"I'm just happy." It was the truest lie she had ever told.

That night, Mia lay in bed with her phone in her hand. She had to tell someone.

She had to know. So she typed, with cold fingers:

“Did you put a camera in the study?

Did anyone from us enter the basement room tonight?” The reply came in ten seconds.

“No.”

“We placed nothing in that house.”

“We took nothing from that room.”.Mia's breath stopped.

She typed again. “Then who?”

For a long minute, the screen stayed blank. Then three little dots appeared. They vanished. They came back.

“We don't know.”

“Mia, be careful. Someone else is hunting Cole. And whoever it is, they are not afraid of us.”

She stared at the words, her heart slamming.

Then her phone buzzed again. A new message with different number.

There was no text. Only a photograph.

Her stomach dropped as it loaded.

It showed a man asleep in a bed. One arm across the pillow, his face soft in the moonlight. A gun on the nightstand.

Ethan.

The picture had been taken from inside his bedroom, only a few feet from his bed. Time stamp: “2:41 a.m.” Under it, one line of bright red text.

“Which of us gets to him first, Ghost?”

Mia sat up in the dark, her whole body shaking because the picture had been taken at 2:41 a.m.

And at 2:41 a.m., she had been standing in his doorway.