Chapter 21 - A Late Night Video Message Reveals A Chilling Secret

As dawn broke over Lake Michigan, painting the sky in bruised shades of purple and orange, my phone buzzed violently on the table. An encrypted video file had just been pushed to my device from an unknown, untraceable offshore server.
When I pressed play, my late mother appeared on screen, looking older and sicker than I remembered from her final days. She stared directly into the camera lens, her voice trembling as she delivered a final, earth-shattering instruction:
“If you are watching this, Dante found you... but he doesn't know that Elena didn't die in that car crash—she faked her death to escape him, and she is coming back for her son.”