Everyone laughed when they sent an eighty-year-old man and his eighteen-year-old wife off to spend their wedding night together. “Let’s see if Grandpa can make it until morning,” one relative joked through a burst of laughter. He didn’t respond. He simply picked up his old briefcase and closed the door. When six relatives opened it the next morning, they stopped laughing when they discovered what he had been protecting all night.

Right at that moment, three slow, deliberate knocks sounded on their locked hotel room door.

PART 3

Walter quickly raised his hand to signal Chloe not to make a single sound.

The three knocks echoed through the silent room once again.

They were not overly loud or aggressive, which made their presence at that hour even more unsettling.

Walter carefully checked the live feed on his smartphone, which was connected to a hidden battery-powered camera he had installed over the door’s peephole earlier that evening.

A hotel security guard appeared in the hallway video, accompanied directly by his lawyer, Samuel Vance.