Chapter 2 - The Voice on the Broken Screen
The call was still on the external speaker.
From the receiver, a deep, resonant baritone echoed across the porch—a voice that carried the terrifying weight of sovereign billions, capable of moving fleets of supertankers across the Atlantic with a single breath.
“Seraphina? Are you hurt? Where is the child?”
The words were low, clipped, and laced with a terrifying, primal protectiveness.
Seraphina kept her gaze locked onto the three people on the porch. “I'm standing in the street, Father. Julian just locked me out of the house. He said I'm dead weight.”
A beat of absolute, suffocating silence dropped over the stormy night.
It was the kind of silence that precedes a naval bombardment.
“Twenty minutes, my angel,” the titan answered softly. “Stay on the sidewalk. No one who breathes on that porch will have a roof over their heads by sunrise.”
The call clicked off.
Julian smirked, tossing his hair. “Father? Your father? You told me your father was an old retired warehouse worker in New Jersey!”
He looked at Gwen and chuckled. “Listen to her trying to sound important with a fake voice actor!”
But beside him, Beatrice had stopped breathing.
Every drop of blood drained from Beatrice Cross’s face until she looked like wet, unpainted plaster. The wine glass in her hand trembled so violently that alcohol splattered across her beige pumps.
Thirty years ago, before she married into a small-time trucking business, Beatrice had spent eighteen months as a junior dispatch clerk in the basement of Hayes Maritime in Manhattan.
She had heard that baritone voice only twice in her life: once over the global address system when the company went public, and once when the CEO fired an entire regional executive board on the spot for stealing pensions.
That voice belonged to Arthur Hayes.
The reclusive maritime emperor who owned fifty container terminals, forty luxury skyscrapers, and a personal fortune exceeding eighteen billion dollars.
“Julian…” Beatrice whispered, her voice cracking into a high, wheezing squeak.
“What, Mom?” Julian snapped, annoyed.
“That voice…” Beatrice grabbed his arm with frantic, white-knuckled desperation. “Who… who did she say her father was?”
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“Some nobody!” Julian scoffed. “She’s bluffing!”
Before Julian could finish his sentence, the stormy night sky above the cul-de-sac shuddered with the deafening roar of low-altitude twin turbines.
