Chapter 163: The Call

The phone kept ringing. Once, twice, three times, then again, the sound echoing through the empty apartment, bouncing off bare walls until it felt louder than it should have.

Nobody moved.

Liam stared at the black laptop, screen still dead. The countdown was gone. Only the ringing remained.

Dexter slowly lowered his own phone. "Find it.

His men moved immediately, one pulling out a second device. "Tracking the signal." Another checked the apartment. "Nothing here."

Jack looked toward the windows. "Could be outside."

"No," Liam said.

Jack turned. Liam’s eyes stayed on the laptop. "The call started after the countdown ended."

"So?"

"So the phone wasn’t the objective." Dexter caught it first. "The sound is."Liam nodded. "He wants us listening."

The ringing stopped. Silence returned. Then it started again, except this time closer.

Jack’s eyes moved toward the hallway. "That’s not outside."

Liam followed the sound into the corridor, one of Dexter’s men moving ahead, another covering the stairwell. Jack stayed close beside him as they followed it down one floor.

It stopped. Jack looked around. "Damn."

Then it started again, from below.

They descended another flight, the sound growing louder, until a door stood at the end of the corridor and the ringing came from behind it, muffled but unmistakable now, like something waiting rather than merely calling.

Dexter’s man reached for the handle. Liam stopped him. "Wait."

He studied the frame. Fresh scratches surrounded the lock, thin and pale against the older paint, the kind left by someone working fast but careful. Someone had opened it recently.

"It’s staged," Liam said.

Dexter nodded once. "Open it."

The door swung inward onto an empty storage room, concrete walls sweating faint with damp, one broken chair, a small table, and a phone. Nothing else. The ringing continued, thin and insistent in the bare space.

Jack walked closer, boots scuffing against the bare concrete. "That’s it?"

Liam didn’t answer. He looked at the ceiling, then the walls, then the phone. Liam pulled a pair of gloves from the table, the latex snapping faintly against his wrists, and only then lifted the receiver.

"Hello."

Static. No voice. He waited. Nothing.

Then the line clicked, and a recording began. The same woman’s voice.

"Liam..."

He froze, not from the voice itself but from what sat beneath it, faint in the background, easy to miss if he hadn’t been listening for exactly this. Three slow metallic knocks. A low mechanical hum.

He listened harder.

"Please..." The line cut.

Jack looked at him. "You recognize it?"

"Yes." Liam kept staring at the phone. "Not the voice. The sound behind it."

He played it again in his head. Three knocks. The hum. Three knocks. The hum.

"Some kind of machine?" Jack asked.

"Probably." Dexter’s man checked the display. "Signal’s gone."

"Trace it."

"Already trying." Liam set the receiver down. The phone’s screen lit up on its own.

You keep looking for a face. A second line beneath it.

You should be looking at what the face already knows.

Jack’s expression hardened. "He knows we’re here."

"No." Jack’s voice stayed quiet. "He knows what we’re thinking." Then he’s listening, Dexter said.

"Maybe. But he wants us to believe that."

The message vanished. Another replaced it.

You have spent too much time asking who I am.

Dexter looked toward the doorway. "Find the source." His men scattered again.

Liam stayed by the table, eyes on the dead phone, gloved fingers still resting near the receiver.

The watcher had handed them information, and information carried both directions. The more carefully it was presented, the more dangerous it usually was.

One of Dexter’s men hurried back a few seconds later. "Boss. We found the signal."

"Where?" The man hesitated. "It’s not coming from this building."

"Then where?"

He handed over the phone. "Three blocks east." Jack looked at Liam. "That’s where the sedan went." Liam shook his head. "No."

"Why?"

"Because that’s exactly where he wants us to look."Dexter nodded, already turning to his men. "Send two. Don’t approach the location," he added. "Watch it."

"Yes, boss."

Liam gave a small nod of approval, the first easy motion he’d made since the phone started ringing. Jack glanced between them. "You think it’s another trap?"

"I think he expects us to chase every clue he leaves." Then what do we do?

Liam looked down at the dead phone in his hand. "We stop chasing."

"And make him come to us," Dexter said.

Liam nodded, and for the first time since the chase began, the three of them stood completely still, rain ticking faint against the window somewhere above them. No running, no searching, no reacting.

They waited.

Five minutes passed. Nothing. Ten. Still nothing.

Then Dexter’s phone buzzed. He checked it, his expression shifting. "Talk."

"Boss, we’ve got something. Checked the location you gave us."

"And?"

"Someone was there."

"Who?" We don’t know. But we found a camera. "Where?" Mounted across the street.

"Anything on it?"

"No." A pause, the man’s voice dropping lower. "Because it wasn’t pointed at the street. It was pointed directly at your building."

Silence settled over the room.

Dexter ended the call. Jack looked at him, rain dripping steadily from his hair onto the concrete floor. "He wasn’t watching us."

"He was watching Dexter," Liam said.

Dexter’s eyes moved to the dark window across the alley. "And he wanted us to know it." The watcher wasn’t hiding anymore.

He was showing them exactly how close he could get, and that changed everything about the shape of this, about how careful they’d need to be from here on.

Dexter’s phone buzzed again. A message this time. He opened it, and his face hardened as he read.Liam looked over.

One sentence.

Tell Liam that some doors are safer left unopened.Dexter turned the screen toward him without a word. Liam read it once. A faint smile crossed his mouth, thin and cold, not amusement.

Recognition.

The watcher had stopped pretending this was a game of shadows. He was threatening him directly now, and directness meant something had finally started to matter to him, a crack showing in whatever composure had carried him this far.

Liam looked toward the window, rain still streaking the dark glass.

"Then let’s see how badly he wants that door to stay closed."

Outside, the rain kept falling over the empty street, steady and indifferent to any of it, streetlights bleeding orange across the wet asphalt, while somewhere in the city, unseen, someone was still watching.