He tied me upside down from the ceiling beam and beat my swollen belly for hours, claiming it would force a son to come out. Blood dripped from my mouth and nose onto the floor while he laughed. The pain became too much and I passed out completely. The doctor reviewed the scans with shaking hands: “The fetus is dead and badly bruised… your spine is also damaged from the suspension.”

Emily tore the security cameras down with a baseball bat.

We spent the rest of the night huddled in the center of the living room, all digital devices powered off and locked in a microwave to block the signals.

"He's a ghost," Emily whispered, staring at the shattered remains of a camera on the floor. "He's just sitting in his mansion, terrorizing you from a laptop."

"It's about control," I said, my voice finally steadying into something cold and sharp. "He lost physical control over me, so he's trying to prove he still owns my mind."

The next morning, the police swept the house and confirmed the network breach. The IP address bounced through a dozen foreign servers—impossible to definitively tie to Daniel in a court of law, though we all knew the truth.

I sat at the kitchen table, staring at the blank screen of the burner phone. Fear had kept me paralyzed for years. It had kept me quiet when he bruised my arms, when he controlled my bank accounts, and when he led me into that utility room.

But sitting in Emily’s kitchen, missing the weight of my baby in my belly, the fear burned away. It was replaced by a dark, consuming rage.

"He thinks he's the only one who knows how to play games," I said aloud.

Emily looked up from her coffee. "What are you talking about?"

"Daniel keeps records," I remembered, the memory surfacing like a morbid treasure. "He doesn't just destroy things; he catalogues them. He used a hidden hard drive for his architectural blueprints, but he also used it to store his 'insurance policies.' Financial blackmail on his clients. If I can get that drive, we don't just have him for assault. We have him for federal extortion."