Chapter 1 - THE FOUR PERCENT PROMISE
The silence inside the third-floor apartment on 14th Street was an absolute, suffocating thing. It wasn't the peaceful quiet of a sleeping home, but the heavy, unnatural stillness that settles over a room immediately after a crime has taken place.
I lay on my side against the rough, synthetic carpet, my cheek pressed against an accumulation of dust, dried beer spills, and jagged shards of clear glass. Five minutes ago, the glass had been a cheap coffee table—a thrift-store assembly of particleboard and tempered glass. Now, it was a minefield scattered around my face, glittering in the harsh, alternating pulses of the liquor store sign outside the window.
Red. Black. Red. Black.
Every pulse of red light cast a bloody hue across the living room, revealing the overturned floor lamp, the torn sofa cushions, and the dark, wet smear on the baseboards where my head had struck the wall before I hit the floor.
I tried to draw a breath, but the air caught in my throat like a hot razor blade. An excruciating explosion of agony ripped through my left side, radiating from my middle ribs up into my shoulder and down into my hip. It was a sharp, grating pain—the distinct, horrifying sensation of bone fragments grinding against bone fragments. Blood, warm and thick, filled the back of my mouth, tasting of salt and copper. I coughed, a tiny, involuntary reflex, and the spasm made my vision go completely black for three agonizing seconds.
When my sight returned, the snoring resumed from behind the cracked bedroom door.
It was a deep, rhythmic, heavy rumble. Trent.
He had kicked me until his heavy work boots were scuffed, until his lungs were tired, until he decided he was bored of my screaming. Then he had simply wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand, stepped over my shivering body, walked into the bedroom, and fallen asleep. He hadn't even bothered to lock the door. He didn't need to. He knew I couldn't stand up. He knew I had nowhere to go. He knew he owned me.
That snoring was worse than the kicks. It was the absolute proof of my utter insignificance to him. He hadn't just beaten me; he had discarded me like a piece of useless trash, confident that I would still be lying here in my own blood when he woke up at noon wanting his breakfast.
Move, my brain whispered. You die here if you don't move.
My right arm was pinned beneath my torso, useless and numb. My left hand lay extended across the carpet, my fingernails caked with dirt. I looked toward the entertainment center. Beneath the bottom shelf of the dark laminate TV stand, a faint metallic glint caught the red glow of the neon sign outside.
My phone.
When Trent had grabbed my hair and slammed me across the coffee table, the phone had flown from my back pocket and slid into the shadow beneath the furniture. It was eight feet away. Eight feet of coarse, glass-strewn carpet that felt like an ocean.
I bit my lower lip until the flesh tore, using the sharp shock of that pain to override the agony in my side. Dragging myself forward by my left elbow, I moved an inch.
A shard of glass bit deep into the palm of my hand. I didn't care. I pulled again. My knees dragged behind me like dead weight. Every fraction of an inch sent shockwaves through my shattered ribcage, causing fresh blood to spill over my chin onto the carpet. Inhale. One inch. Exhale. Don't scream.
It took three minutes to cross those eight feet. Three minutes of silent, agonizing torture while the man who broke me slept five yards away.
Finally, my outstretched fingertips brushed against the cold, smooth aluminum edge of the phone. I hooked two fingers around the corner and pulled it into my chest.
I flipped it over. The screen was spider-webbed with fine white cracks, but the display flickered to life, illuminating my bloody face with a pale, cold light.
BATTERY: 4%.
Panic, colder and sharper than the physical pain, gripped my throat. Four percent. Maybe three minutes of power before the screen went black forever.
I needed Ben.
Ben was my older brother, two years older, a former army medic turned rogue paramedic who ran private medical transport for unsavory characters in Chicago’s West Side. Six months ago, outside a diner on Western Avenue, after seeing a purple bruise on my jaw that I had lied about, Ben had grabbed my shoulders in the pouring rain.
"You’re choosing your own funeral, Clara," he had yelled, his eyes full of furious, helpless grief. "He's going to kill you, and you're going to let him. Don't expect me to come carry your coffin when it happens. I can't watch you destroy yourself."
We hadn't spoken since that night. But Ben knew how to set ribs. He knew how to stop internal bleeding without asking questions. And because he had outstanding warrants from an old bar fight in Cook County, he would never, ever call the police—which meant Trent wouldn't hear sirens coming down the street.
Trent checked my phone every night before he went to sleep. He deleted my friends' numbers, blocked my brother, monitored my social media. To survive, I had memorized Ben’s burner phone number, repeating the ten digits like a mantra every time I lay awake in the dark.
3-1-2... 5-5-5... 0-1-9-8.
My hands were shaking so violently that my thumbs kept hitting the wrong keys. Blood from my palm smeared across the cracked glass, obscuring the digital keypad. Pain blurred my vision, turning the numbers into double images.
I tapped the screen hastily, pulled up the basic messaging app, typed the digits I thought were correct, and scrambled to type the text before the phone died.
Trent went too far. He broke my ribs. Can't breathe. Need help. Please.
I hit SEND.
The green text bubble floated to the top of the screen. A small label appeared beneath it: DELIVERED.
I let out a shuddering, tear-stained breath, resting my forehead against the carpet. Hold on, Clara. Ben is coming. He’s mad at you, but he won't let you die.
Ten seconds passed. Twenty.
The phone vibrated against my hand, the sharp buzz sounding like an explosion in the quiet room. I flinched, glancing nervously toward the cracked bedroom door. The snoring continued uninterrupted.
I lifted the phone to my eyes, expecting to see Ben's angry, frantic reply asking for my exact apartment number.
Instead, a text from an unmapped number appeared on the screen:
Well... now who is this?
My blood froze in my veins.
The tone was wrong. It wasn't Ben’s clinical, urgent anger. It was calm. Inquisitive. Completely detached.
With frantic, trembling fingers, I typed back, blood smearing the key graphics:
It's Clara. Ben, please. I'm coughing blood.
Three gray dots appeared at the bottom of the screen.
Typing...
Then they disappeared.
Typing...
They disappeared again.
My eyes slowly drifted from the text field up to the header at the top of the screen—the phone number I had just dialed.
312-555-0189
My stomach dropped into a bottomless pit of sheer terror. In my blindness, in my pain-blinded desperation, my thumb had inverted the last two digits. Instead of 0198, I had sent 0189.
It was a wrong number.
A complete stranger now held my plea for life in their hands.
"No, no, no..." I whimpered, a breathless, broken sound.
Hope, the fragile thing keeping my heart beating, shattered into pieces far smaller than the coffee table glass around me. Humiliation, deep and burning, washed over me. I had exposed the dark, disgusting truth of my life to a random stranger in the middle of the night. Someone sitting in a quiet apartment somewhere, probably thinking it was a prank, or a wrong number drama they wanted no part of.
I tapped the screen to block the number, wanting to erase my mistake before the phone died completely, when another message flashed onto the display:
Not Ben. But I’m on my way. Give me the address.
I stared at the words.
Not Ben. But I’m on my way.
My breath hitched. The screen blurred as fresh tears overflowed my eyes. Was this a sick joke? Was some bored teenager on the other end of the line amusing himself with a dying woman’s panic?
BATTERY: 2%
The low-battery warning flashed across the center of the display, threatening to turn the screen black forever within seconds. Skepticism was a luxury for people who weren't drowning in their own blood on a living room floor.
Why would you come? my fingers typed, shaking so badly the phone almost slipped from my grasp.
The reply came back in less than three seconds.
Address. Now.
It wasn't an offer. It wasn't a sympathetic gesture. It was a direct, razor-sharp command that carried a terrifying, absolute authority. It sliced through the fog of pain and terror in my mind, forcing my instincts to obey before my reason could object.
I didn't type the text. Instead, with my thumb hovering over the interface, I tapped the tiny compass icon at the bottom of the chat window.
Share Current Location.
Location sent: 1422 W. 14th Street, Apt 3B.
One final text message illuminated the cracked screen, the letters glowing white against the dark background:
Stay on the floor. Ten minutes.
The display flickered twice, turned dark gray, and then faded into complete, unrecoverable blackness. The battery was dead.
I lay in the dark, the dead phone cold against my cheek.
Ten minutes.
A stranger had my address. A stranger who hadn't asked if I had called the police. A stranger who hadn't offered empty sympathy or asked for explanations. A stranger who had simply told me he was coming, and commanded me to stay on the floor.
Suddenly, the snoring behind the bedroom door stopped.
May you like
The silence returned, but this time it was different. It wasn't the silence of sleep. It was the heavy, shifting silence of a predator turning over in bed.
I heard the rusty springs of the mattress groan as a heavy weight shifted. Then, the dull thud of bare feet hitting the hardwood floor.
