Chapter 6: The Confession in the Little Hands
Ethan ignored Brianna entirely. He turned his back on her, carrying a sobbing Sophia toward the plush velvet settee near the grand staircase. Kneeling down beside her, he gently pulled her small, trembling hands away from her chest.
In her tiny palms rested the silver smartphone—the exact device Brianna had been screaming about.
A low, mournful cello chord seemed to echo in Ethan’s mind as a sharp intake of breath caught in his throat. He looked down at his daughter’s tear-stained face, wiping a stray porcelain dust speck from her cheek with his thumb.
“Sophia, sweetheart, look at me,” Ethan murmured softly, keeping his voice as gentle as possible to soothe her racing heart. “You’re safe. Daddy’s right here. No one is going to hurt you. Can you tell me why you have this phone?”
Sophia sniffled, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her blush pink dress. Her big, watery eyes looked up into her father’s face with absolute, unshielded trust.
“Daddy... I hid under the vanity when she was talking,” Sophia sobbed softly, her small voice trembling as she clutched the silver phone tighter. “I heard her saying scary things... she was talking to a bad man on the phone. She said... she said something really, really mean about you, Daddy.”
Ethan’s heart skipped a beat. The air in the grand foyer felt suddenly thin, as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. He reached out and carefully took the silver smartphone from his daughter’s shaking hands.
Brianna lunged forward from the base of the stairs, her face draining of all color, realizing the catastrophic mistake she had made by leaving the phone unattended and letting the child escape with it.
“Ethan, don't touch that!” Brianna screamed, her voice cracking with unmasked panic as she sprinted toward them. “It’s a glitch! It’s a prank app! She hacked it! Don't listen to her!”
May you like
“Stay back!” Ethan bellowed, turning his head sharply toward Brianna with a look so dark and lethal that she froze dead in her tracks, her manicured fingers hovering in mid-air.
Ethan looked back down at the phone screen. The device was unlocked, displaying an active voice recorder application paused directly on a saved audio file labeled ‘Draft_Final_Rec_02’.
