“Fourteen hours after our wedding, my husband threw a filthy, grease-covered rag in my face in front of twenty-two of his relatives. ‘Get on your knees and clean it. Learn the rules,’ he sneered. His mother smiled proudly. They thought they had broken me on the first day. I didn’t cry. I smiled. ‘I need to wash my face,’ I whispered. I went upstairs, packed my passport, $45,000, and a deadly secret. When he tried to lock me inside the bedroom, he had no idea that I was the one locking him in...”

The locker was in the bowels of the station. Inside was a leather bag with a wig, a set of high-quality forged documents, and a pair of glasses that made me look like an entirely different person—a quiet academic named Sarah Jenkins.

I changed in the bathroom, feeling the weight of Chloe Blackwood shedding. Chloe had been an accessory, a decoration, a victim. Sarah Jenkins was invisible.

I looked in the mirror. The woman looking back at me was still scared, but the fear was different now. It was the fear of the hunt, not the fear of the cage.

I walked back out into the crowd. I didn't see the man in the wool coat anymore. He had vanished, a whisper in the wind.

I boarded a bus headed south. I didn't know where I was going, only that I had to keep moving until the adrenaline stopped shaking my hands.

The news on the bus’s TV screen caught my attention. A breaking report. A fire had broken out at the Blackwood estate. "Suspicious circumstances," the anchor said.