Chapter 163: The Emergency Call That Used Her Voice
The fallout from the flower stall clung to them as they crossed Confederation Square, the stark, illuminated faces of the Parliament Buildings watching like silent judges. Francis had retreated into a stony silence after Xia dismantled the photo evidence, his calculations clearly rerouting. Sterling had just stared, the word ‘remove’ echoing in his head with a chilling finality. They needed a witness who understood Sterling’s instincts better than anyone.
They found Kiara Fraser waiting on a bench outside Ottawa City Hall, her posture rigid against the granite backdrop. The yellow light from the historic lampposts painted her in stark relief, a statue of contained anxiety. She stood as they approached, her eyes skipping past Xia and Antoinette to search the shadows behind them.
“Where is he?”
“Not here,” Antoinette said, stopping a few feet away. “We need your assessment of the evidence presented against him.”
She summarized it quickly: the delivery receipt, the fabricated photo, the time-stamp inconsistency. Kiara listened, her arms crossed tight against the cold seeping up from the stone pavement. Her breath plumed in short, impatient bursts.
“It’s garbage,” she stated, the moment Antoinette finished. Her voice was flat, absolute. “Sterling can’t fake a parking ticket without leaving fingerprints on the printer and confessing out of guilt five minutes later. He’s reckless, not careful. He attacks problems with a hammer, not a scalpel. This?” She gestured dismissively. “This is scalpel work. It’s someone arranging pieces to tell a story.”
“The story being that he is the impostor,” Xia said.
“The story being that he’s the obvious patsy,” Kiara corrected, her gaze fierce. “So we stop looking at anyone else. The real saboteur gets a free pass while we’re all busy trying to manage my cousin’s next explosion.” She shook her head, a muscle ticking in her jaw. “He’s a distraction. A loud, messy, perfect distraction.”
Her phone rang, the default tone jarringly loud in the official quiet of the square. She glanced at the screen, her brow furrowing at the unknown number. She swiped to answer, putting it to her ear. “Hello?”
“Kiara—oh god, Kiki, he’s on me.” Sterling’s voice tore through the speaker, breathless, choked with a panic she’d heard only once before, the night he’d called from the emergency room after the alley fight. It kicked her heart into her throat. “It’s Eric. He’s following me, like right on my ass, in his truck. I’m near that parking area behind the old post office on Albert, he’s—I think he’s gonna run me off the road or something. You gotta come. Now.”
The call went dead.
Everything compressed into a single, white-hot point of action. Kiara was already moving, shoving the phone into her pocket, her body pivoting toward the direction of the commercial streets west of them. “It’s Sterling. Eric’s after him. Albert Street.”
“Kiara, wait—” Xia began, her voice a calm blade trying to cut through the momentum.
But Kiara was already running, her boots slapping against the wet pavement, coat flaring behind her. She didn’t look back.
Antoinette met Xia’s eyes for a fraction of a second. She saw it instantly—the unthinking, protective leap, the courage that outran reason. It was a mirror of her own younger self in the dusty heat of Kinshasa, chasing a rumor of a friend in trouble without checking for the trap. She took off after Kiara without another word, Xia falling into step beside her with unsettling silence.
Kiara weaved through the sparse late-evening crowds, a streak of focused velocity. The ornate facade of City Hall blurred past, then the darker, quieter blocks of office buildings. The parking lot behind the converted post office was a desolate concrete slab lit by two flickering sodium lamps that buzzed like angry insects. It was empty of people.
Empty, except for a single motorcycle parked at a crooked angle under the farthest lamp.
It was Eric’s bike, a customized Honda Nighthawk he treated with a twisted sort of reverence. From twenty feet away, they could see the long, vicious scratch carved into the deep black paint of the gas tank and fender, gleaming silver in the jaundiced light. It was fresh; tiny curls of paint still clung to the edges of the gouge.
Kiara skidded to a halt, her chest heaving. Her eyes scanned the shadows of the loading docks, the dumpster alcoves. “Sterling?” Her call was sharp, swallowed by the vast, empty dark. “Sterling!”
No answer. Just the buzz of the lamps and the distant groan of a city bus.
Antoinette approached the motorcycle slowly, her hand outstretched but not touching the damaged paint. The scratch was deep, deliberate. It wasn’t the result of a fall or a scrape. It was an act of defilement.
Kiara’s phone lit up in her hand. A new message from an unknown number. No preamble. Just seven words:
Family makes you predictable.
She stared at the screen, the words not processing at first. Then they sank in, cold and corrosive. Her head snapped up, looking from the ruined motorcycle to Antoinette’s grim face, to Xia who was already manipulating her own translucent data panel.
“It was not him,” Xia said, her voice cutting the static. She angled the panel so the pale light illuminated her features. “The call. A vocal synthesis. Cloned from public social media clips and, I suspect, older voice messages you may have saved. The panic was modulated, but the base frequency is inconsistent with a live human under genuine duress.”
Kiara’s face went blank, then flushed with a sickening wave of understanding. The breathless fear in Sterling’s voice… it had been a perfect, personalized weapon. She’d been manipulated by an echo. Her greatest strength—her uncompromising drive to protect him—had been used as a leash to lead her directly to a crime scene where every implication pointed to his uncontrollable rage. Again.
She looked at the scratch on the bike, a fresh piece of evidence being manufactured in real-time. Her predictable heart had delivered her right to it.
“They’re not just framing him,” she whispered, the anger in her voice now molten with a horrible, personal shame. “They’re using me to do it.”
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The Westin Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada — at 11 Colonel By Drive, connected to the Rideau Centre and near the Rideau Canal.
They left the hollow, buzzing darkness of the parking lot behind, the image of the scored motorcycle lingering like a retinal burn. None of them spoke in the cab to the Westin. The silent understanding between them was adhesive and grim: the attack had moved from physical frames into digital whispers, and they needed to trace the source of the breath.
Aria Baker was waiting for them in a small, windowless service office on the hotel’s second floor, a space that smelled of industrial carpet cleaner and dormant electronics. The room was lit by the cold blue glow of a single monitor on a stark desk. Aria looked up as they entered, her usual polished composure showing fine cracks—a tightness around her eyes, a stillness in her hands that suggested held breath.
“You saw the motorcycle,” she said, not a question. Her voice was quiet, stripped of its hostess cadence.
“We were led to it,” Antoinette corrected, closing the door softly. The click of the latch was final. “With a recording of Sterling’s voice. The sabotage is auditory now.”
“It started with lists,” Aria replied, turning the monitor toward them. On the screen was a sleek event management portal, displaying a guest list for a private diplomatic reception held in the Westin’s Riverview Room the previous evening. “Access is the first fiction. Someone writes your name in, or writes it out, and reality bends to accommodate.”
Her finger, tipped in a neat, neutral polish, tapped a line halfway down. The entry read: Gill, Melody. Check-in: 9:42 p.m. Guest of: Ramos. Alfredo’s name. The time stamp glowed, a pristine digital fact.
Antoinette leaned in, her shadow falling across the screen. “Melody told us she was working her bar shift until eleven. She was firm on that.”
“I know,” Aria said, her gaze fixed on the entry. “I was at that reception. I never saw her. Not once. And Alfredo never mentioned inviting her. He would have, if only to boast.” She took a shallow breath. “So either she lied about working, which makes no sense, or this entry is a ghost. Someone planted it to give her an alibi she doesn’t need, or to place her somewhere she wasn’t.”
“Why show us?” Antoinette’s question was a direct probe, devoid of warmth.
“Because the framing is transactional. It uses systems.” Aria finally looked at her, then at Xia who stood observing like a sentinel. “The fake photo of Sterling needed a fake time stamp. This fake check-in needs a corrupted guest log. They’re not just making scenes. They’re editing the database of what’s real. I handle these lists. I know how easy it is to add or delete a person with the right privileges.”
“Are you accusing your friend?” Antoinette asked, her tone carefully neutral.
Aria’s expression didn’t flinch. “I’m showing you what the system says. Not what I want to believe.”
Xia, who had been silent, took a single step closer. Her mercury-flecked eyes reflected the scrolling data on the screen. “The privilege. Who has it?”
“A handful of event coordinators, senior hotel security, the host’s designated planner—in this case, me.” Aria’s admission hung in the sterile air. “And anyone who could compromise their login.”
As the three of them focused on the entry, the pixels comprising Melody’s name shimmered.
It was a brief, digital hiccup, a fleeting decay of coherence. Then the letters dissolved, scrolling upward as if sucked into a vacuum. In the blank space they left, new text rasterized into existence, letter by unmistakable letter.
Fraser, Kiara. Check-in: 9:42 p.m. Guest of: Lake.
The blood drained from Aria’s face, leaving a parchment pallor. Her hand jerked instinctively toward the keyboard.
“Do not touch it,” Xia commanded, the words a quiet ice-water splash.
Aria froze, her fingers hovering above the keys. She stared, uncomprehending, at Kiara’s name now irrevocably paired with Eric’s. “That’s not… I didn’t…”
“We are watching the edit happen in real time,” Xia said, her voice low and focused. “The log is not a record. It is a living document they control.”
Antoinette felt a cold understanding crystallize in her gut, sharper than fear. The impostor wasn’t just staging scenes in parking lots or splicing voice recordings. They were inside the very architecture of verification, rewriting the past with a keystroke to weaponize the future. They had turned Aria’s evidence into a ticking bomb that now implicated Kiara, and by extension, the narrative of a vengeful alliance with Eric.
The screen’s glow seemed to pulse, a malevolent heart in the dark room.
“They aren’t just planting evidence,” Antoinette whispered, the truth settling over her with a profound weight. “They’re making every truth temporary. You can’t trust what you saw, what you heard, or even what the official record says you did.”
Somewhere in Ottawa, in a room lit by a different screen, someone was proving that reality was just the first draft. And they held the pen.
=====
Heart & Crown, ByWard Market, Ottawa, Canada — on Clarence Street, near York Street and the main ByWard Market nightlife area.
The air inside the Heart & Crown before opening was stale and sharp, a dense mixture of last night’s spilled ale, citrus-scented disinfectant, and the flat, metallic tang of draft lines being flushed. It was a vacuum, holding the silence of stories not yet curated for the evening crowd. Melody Gill stood behind the long, scarred wooden bar, her back to the rows of glittering bottles, facing them with the weary defiance of someone who’d been up all night polishing ghosts.
She didn’t offer a drink. “I told you on the phone. I was here. Clocked in at six, clocked out after close at two. Ask anyone.” Her voice was husky from lack of sleep, her usually bright eyes shadowed.
Antoinette placed her hands flat on the cool bar top. “We’re not questioning your shift. We’re questioning a ghost. Your name appeared on a guest list for an event you say you didn’t attend.”
“Because I didn’t.” Melody’s laugh was short, dry. “Aria’s list is wrong. Systems glitch. People make mistakes typing names.”
“This mistake has your specific login footprint appended to the edit log,” Xia stated softly from near the door, her eyes scanning the dim room. “The system says you were there. We need to understand what the cameras say you were doing here instead.”
Melody held her gaze for a long beat, then sighed, the fight seeming to seep out of her shoulders. “Fine. Follow me.” She led them through a swinging door into a cramped back hallway lined with stacked kegs and supply racks. The smell of beer turned richer, earthier, mixed with damp concrete.
The manager’s office was a closet with a monitor. Melody clicked through a file directory, her movements efficient. She pulled up the archived footage from the rear entrance and storage hallway for the night of the reception. “This camera covers the back door and the hall to the cold room. I went out for a smoke break around nine-forty. Once.”
The black-and-white video played at high speed. There was Melody, a grayscale figure in a denim jacket, pushing open the heavy metal door at 9:38 p.m. She stood in the wedge of light from inside, the glow from her cigarette tip flaring like a tiny star. At 9:50 p.m., she flicked the butt into the alley and came back in.
“See?” Melody said, pointing. “Right there. Twelve minutes. That’s it.”
Antoinette leaned in. “Run it again from nine-thirty to ten. Normal speed.”
The footage crawled. Melody exited. The door swung shut. The empty hallway was illuminated by a single, ugly fluorescent tube that buzzed audibly through the speaker. The time code in the corner ticked forward: 9:39:12… 9:39:13…
At 9:42:07, the screen fractured into a storm of digital static. It hissed and popped, a null zone of broken information.
It cleared at 9:54:21, showing the empty hallway again, seconds before Melody re-entered.
“Twelve missing minutes,” Xia said. Her voice wasn’t accusatory. It was a statement of fact, cold and clean as the void on the screen.
Melody stared, her breath catching. “That’s not possible. That system never glitches. It’s on a closed loop.”
“It did this time,” Antoinette replied, her eyes still on the frozen, noisy gap. “Right during the window you’re supposed to be somewhere else. Someone edited the feed. They wanted to create an ambiguity.”
“They wanted to give you an alibi you didn’t need,” Xia corrected, turning from the screen. “Or hide what you were really doing. Where is your cold storage?”
Melody led them further down the hall, her earlier certainty now replaced by a sharp, prickling anxiety. She yanked open the heavy door to the walk-in cooler. A wave of humid, frigid air washed over them, smelling of wet cardboard and yeast.
Antoinette’s eyes, adjusted to the gloom, caught the glint first. Near the bottom of a steel rack loaded with cases of Belgian ale, a scatter of crystal shards sparkled against the dark, damp concrete floor. It wasn’t just broken glass. It was a specific, violent constellation.
She crouched, not touching. “Melody. A light.”
Melody flicked on the overhead bulb. The glass was thick, green, the base of a premium bottle. Xia knelt beside Antoinette, her gaze methodical. She didn’t look at the glass. She looked under the rack, into the shadows.
Her fingers, slender and precise, emerged with a jagged spear of a bottleneck. The label was torn, but a rectangular shipping sticker clung to the neck, barcoded and printed. The route code was clear: FM-3347.
Francis Menton’s identifier.
“He delivers here,” Melody said quickly, her voice tight in the cold. “He does all the premium liquor for the district. That doesn’t mean anything.”
Xia rotated the glass under the light. On the broken edge, where it would have sliced into the hand that swung it, was a rust-brown smear, nearly black. It was small, already dulled by time.
Blood.
“This wasn’t dropped,” Antoinette said, standing up. Her voice echoed slightly in the metallic chill. “This was smashed. Recently. The clean-up missed this.” She scanned the floor again, then the underside of the metal shelving unit. A piece of off-white tape, the same as the staff used for labeling kegs, was stuck to the bottom of a middle shelf.
Taped to it was a small, folded square of thick paper.
Xia peeled it free, unfolded it. The handwriting was a controlled, impersonal block print.
SHE KEEPS WHAT OTHERS SPILL.
Melody’s face, already pale from the cold, went absolutely bloodless. All the practiced charm, the easy smile, drained away as if a plug had been pulled. She stared at the note in Xia’s hand as if it were a live wire.
“What does that mean, Melody?” Antoinette asked, her tone low but insistent.
The silence in the cooler grew thick, broken only by the hum of the compressor. Melody wrapped her arms around herself, a futile gesture against a cold that was now internal.
“It means they know,” she finally whispered, her voice cracking. “It’s about Eric.”
She looked from Antoinette to Xia, her eyes haunted. “A race, last summer. Out near the old quarry roads. It wasn’t an accident. He forced a kid—a rich college kid who’d mocked him—into the guardrail. Orchestrated it. Called it ‘teaching a lesson.’”
She took a shuddering breath. “I was there. I saw the whole thing. And after, when the ambulances were coming, I found a phone. It wasn’t the kid’s. It was one of Eric’s crew, must have dropped it in the chaos. It was recording audio. The whole damn plan was on it. Eric’s voice, giving the signals.”
“You kept it,” Xia stated.
“I kept it,” Melody admitted, the shame hot in her voice. “I thought… insurance. Or maybe I’d have the guts to use it. But I never did. Because Eric doesn’t operate alone. That recording doesn’t just name him. It names Francis, who organized the bet. It hints at payoffs to a nightclub bouncer who’s Aria’s friend. It’s a grenade. Pull the pin, and it doesn’t just blow up Eric. It takes out… other people. People who maybe don’t deserve to get shredded over his games.”
Antoinette understood immediately. “So you buried it. A secret weapon you were too afraid to fire.”
“And now someone else has found the blueprint for it,” Xia said, looking at the note, then at the broken bottle with Francis’s code, then at Melody’s shattered composure. The connections woven were deliberate, grotesque. “The impostor knows you possess this recording. They are not accusing you. They are activating you.”
She held Melody’s gaze, her mercury-flecked eyes seeing the entire, ugly strategy unfold. “By linking you to Francis through this staged evidence, by invoking Eric, they are applying pressure to the exact point of your secret. They are forcing the hidden evidence into the open, hoping the resulting explosion will tear your group apart from the inside. Either you reveal the recording to clear yourself of this new frame, destroying your friends in the process, or you take the fall for crimes you didn’t commit.”
Melody leaned back against the cold steel wall, her breath a visible plume of despair. “So what do I do? I’m trapped.”
“No,” Xia said, folding the note with a crisp, final motion. “You are now a piece that has been identified on the board. The moves available to you have just been drastically reduced.” She looked toward the cooler door, toward the world outside where digital ghosts and physical frames were merging into one seamless attack. “The question is no longer if the recording will surface. It is when, and who they will make you use it against first.”