Chapter 1 - The Weight of the Siren Song
The blue and red flashing lights of the Paradise Valley police cruisers cast a violent, frantic strobe across the expensive crown molding of our master bedroom. Outside, the rain beat a steady, merciless tattoo against the double-paned windows. Inside, the air tasted of copper, panic, and old perfume.
I sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor, my soaked suit jacket sticking coldly to my back, cradling Irene’s unconscious body against my chest. Her cheek was already swelling into a ugly, mottled purple, her breathing shallow and raspy. The blood from her split lip had smeared onto the fabric of my white dress shirt, leaving a dark, accusing stain.
“Austin! You can’t be serious!” My mother, Margaret, was pacing the perimeter of the room now, her designer cashmere cardigan pulled tightly around her shoulders as if she were suddenly freezing. Her face had shifted from absolute terror to a calculated, razor-sharp veneer of indignation. “After everything I sacrificed for you? After raising you alone in that drafty house in Chicago while working double shifts? You’re going to let these cops put handcuffs on me because of her?”
Carla, my twenty-four-year-old sister, was crouched by the open suitcase filled with our gold coins, legal deeds, and stacks of banded hundred-dollar bills. Her hands were still smudged with black metal shavings from the electronic keypad she had tried to smash with the hammer.
“Mom, shut up,” Carla hissed, her voice trembling with hysteria. “Crying isn’t going to work on him right now. Look at his eyes. He’s not our Austin tonight.”
“I’m the exact same Austin you’ve been lying to for years,” I whispered, the words barely audible over the heavy boots of four police officers storming up the curved oak staircase.
Lieutenant Harris, a weathered veteran with salt-and-pepper hair and sharp, assessing eyes, led the charge. He burst into the bedroom with his hand resting on his holster, but stopped dead when he saw the tableau: Irene crumpled in my arms, the battered safe hanging open on the wall, the packed suitcase, and my mother and sister standing over the wreckage.
“All right, everybody freeze,” Harris commanded, his voice cutting through the noise. He flicked his gaze from Margaret to Carla, and finally down to me and Irene. “Dispatch reported a home invasion in progress with a pregnant female down. Who called it in?”
“I did,” I said, looking up at the lieutenant. My voice didn't shake. It felt hollowed out, carved from stone. “My name is Austin Wentworth. This is my house. That woman on the floor is my pregnant wife. And those two—” I pointed a steady finger toward my mother and sister “—are the ones who broke into our safe and assaulted her.”
“Austin, don't you dare!” Margaret shrieked, lunging forward, but a younger female officer intercepted her, gently but firmly pushing her back against the mahogany dresser.
“Ma’am, step back and keep your hands where I can see them,” the officer ordered.
Lieutenant Harris knelt beside me, pulling a pair of medical gloves from his pocket as he checked Irene’s pulse at her throat. “Paramedics are right behind us with the stretcher. She’s breathing, Mr. Wentworth, but her pulse is rapid. How far along is she?”
“Three months,” I choked out, a sudden knot tightening in my chest. “She’s three months pregnant with our first child. We tried for five years.”
Harris’s expression darkened. He looked at the split lip, the torn nightgown shoulder, and the bruising on her cheek. Then he stood up, looking past me to Carla, who was desperately trying to zip the overflowing suitcase shut.
“Officer Davis, cuff those two,” Harris commanded crisply. “Charge them with second-degree burglary, domestic assault, and endangerment of an unborn child.”
“You can’t do this!” Margaret screamed as the cold steel cuffs clicked around her wrists. She thrashed against the officer, her perfectly styled silver hair coming loose from its pins. “Austin! You’ll regret this before the week is out! You think she’s an angel? You have no idea what she’s been doing behind your back while you were flying to Chicago and London!”
I didn’t answer her. I didn’t blink. I kept my eyes fixed on Irene as the paramedics rushed through the bedroom door with a rolling gurney, gently lifting her from my arms and rushing her out toward the waiting ambulance.
As they carried her away, I reached into my pocket, pulled out my phone, and tapped the screen to stop the video recording that had been running continuously since I first pushed the door open. The digital file saved with a soft chime.
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Proof. Unedited, undeniable proof.
Little did I know, as I stood up to follow my wife down to the hospital, that the video in my pocket was only the prologue to a nightmare that went much deeper than a smashed safe and a stolen suitcase.
