Bound to two wooden chairs in the center of the frame were my mother and father. My mother’s eyes were wide with terror, a thick piece of duct tape covering her mouth. My father looked pale, his chest heaving as he struggled to breathe without his oxygen machine. Standing behind them, looking perfectly manicured in his wedding tuxedo, was Hung.
He held the camera with one hand, while his other hand casually rested on my father’s fragile shoulder. He smiled into the lens—the same warm, handsome smile that had made me feel so safe.
“Good morning, my beautiful wife,” Hung’s voice echoed from the phone’s speaker, smooth and devoid of any malice, which made it infinitely more terrifying. “You missed our wedding night. My mother was terribly embarrassed explaining your absence to our guests.”
I fell to my knees in front of the phone, sobbing uncontrollably. “Hung… please… please don’t hurt them. They don’t know anything! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, please…”
“I know they don’t know anything, sweetheart,” Hung replied softly, adjusting the camera angle so I could see the timer on my father’s medical monitor ticking down. “But you do. Or rather, you’re about to. My father always was a weak-willed sentimentalist. He thought he was saving you. But all he did was complicate things.”
Hung leaned closer to the camera, his eyes turning into cold, dark voids.
“You have exactly forty-five minutes to bring your laptop and the backup drive back to the hotel penthouse, Vy. Don’t call the police. Don’t tell your little friend to run. Because if you aren’t standing in front of me by 7:15 a.m., I will personally turn off your father’s pacemaker. And then, we’ll see how much your mother fetched on the open market.”
He blew a kiss toward the screen. “See you soon, my love.”
The screen went black.
The silence returned, heavier and deadlines than before. I stared at the blank phone, the laptop screen still glowing with the evidence of a monster’s empire, and the ten $100 bills on the nightstand.
I had forty-five minutes. If I stayed, my parents would die. If I went, I was walking straight into a slaughterhouse.
As I stood up, wiping the tears from my face, a soft, metallic click echoed from the front door of Linh’s apartment.
Linh and I froze, turning our heads slowly toward the entryway. The doorknob was turning, slowly, deliberately from the outside.
