He Found His 6-Year-Old Son Scrubbing a Glass Roof—Then Realized His Wife Had Been Torturing Him All Along / Chapter 9 / 20

Chapter 9 - The Dark HouseCLICK.

The entire mansion plunged into absolute, pitch-black darkness. The master breaker had been blown.

Simultaneously, the heavy steel hurricane shutters installed on every window of the ground floor slammed shut with a deafening CRASH, sealing the house like a vault.

"What the hell?!" Marcus roared, firing blindly into the dark.

The muzzle flash illuminated the room for a fraction of a second, but David was already gone. He had mapped this room in his head a thousand times. He rolled over the back of the velvet sofa, landing silently on the thick Persian rug as bullets tore through the upholstery where he had just been standing.

"Marcus! Get the lights on!" Evelyn screamed, her voice shrill with sudden panic.

"I can't see a damn thing!" Marcus growled.

David crawled silently toward the smart-home control panel hidden behind a bookshelf. The house was offline from the internet, but the internal battery-operated intranet was still active.

He tapped a sequence on the glass panel.

Suddenly, heavy metal music blared from the surround-sound speakers in the ceiling, the volume dialed to absolute maximum. The noise was physically painful, a wall of deafening sound that completely masked David's movements.

Marcus spun around, disoriented, clutching his ears.

David didn't use a gun. A gun in the dark was a liability. He pulled the heavy tactical flashlight from his belt.

He crept up behind the giant ex-cop. With a surge of adrenaline, David clicked the flashlight to its highest strobe setting and shoved it directly into Marcus's face.

The blinding, pulsating light seared Marcus's retinas. He screamed, dropping his weapon to cover his eyes.

David didn't hesitate. He swung the heavy, metal body of the flashlight like a baseball bat, cracking it brutally into Marcus's kneecap.

Bone snapped. Marcus bellowed in agony, collapsing to the floor.

Before the massive man could recover, David drove his boot into Marcus's jaw. The ex-cop’s head snapped back, hitting the marble floor with a sickening thud. Marcus went completely limp.

The heavy metal music cut off instantly.

The silence that followed was suffocating. The only sound was Evelyn's rapid, terrified breathing from the corner of the room.

"Marcus?" she whispered into the dark. "Marcus, get up!"

A single spotlight flickered on.

It illuminated David. He was standing over Marcus’s unconscious body, his face splattered with the hitman's blood. The strobe light cast long, demonic shadows across David’s face. He looked like a man possessed. He looked like a father who had been pushed too far.

He slowly turned his gaze toward Evelyn.

"He's not getting up, Evelyn," David said, his voice echoing off the vaulted ceilings.