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MARQUETTE COVE HIGH SCHOOL
Sounds of teenagers laughing and chattering away loudly cloud Alexis Lopez's mind as she pushes through the cafeteria's double doors and takes a deep breath. She scans the room for her friends and finally finds them sitting at a round table near the windows.
Alexis hurries over to the table and plops down, where her best friend Jessica Reyes clutches her boyfriend Vincent Moore tightly.
"Girl, where the hell have you been?" Jessica demands, eyeing Alexis suspiciously.
Alexis shrugs. "I overslept."
"You're always oversleeping."
"Well, I'm the only one who stays up all night studying."
"I stay up all night," Jessica says, grinning as she kisses Vince.
"Also, why are you wearing a sweater? It's still summer," Vince points out.
"Judging my fashion choices? Who knew your boyfriend was gay," Alexis laughs.
"Speaking of gay, where the hell is Alec?" Vince asks.
"Hanging out with the fucking misery crowd," Damon Johnson offers, approaching the table.
Everyone glances over to the opposite side of the room, where Alec sits with Blake, Blake's brother Thomas, and Thomas' girlfriend Kelli Anderson.
"I'd like for my best friend to stop hanging out with losers," Vince mutters. "Can we do something about that?"
"Thomas isn't a loser," Jessica insists. "He's on the track team."
"Yeah, but he could hang out with the hot cheerleaders like you," Damon says, sliding into a seat next to Alexis. "Instead, he hangs out with that prissy bitch Kelli."
As Damon wraps his arms around her, she tenses up, quickly pushing him away. Suddenly realizing that everyone is staring at her awkwardly, Alexis puts on a forced smile and turns her attention to Jessica. "Hey...um...do you think I could spend the night at your house?"
"Your Dad going out of town again?"
Alexis nods. "Yeah, he is. You know how much I hate being in that house alone."
"I could always come over and keep you company, baby," Damon insists.
Alexis and Jessica both roll their eyes. "Eww."
Alexis stands up, grabbing her purse. "I'm gonna get some eats." As she moves toward the dwindling lunch line, she stops for a moment to roll up the right sleeve of her sweater.
She winces at the sight of a dark, fresh bruise on her arm. Fighting back a sudden onset of tears, Alexis pushes the sleeve down and soldiers on toward the lunch line.
MARQUETTE COVE MEMORIAL HOSPITAL
THE PRESENT
Alexis raises her head, only able to squint in the dark, smoke-filled basement of the damaged hospital. She didn't immediately recognize the man who'd knocked her unconscious and handcuffed her to a door, but now she recognizes his voice and the outline of his body.
She definitely knows who she's speaking to.
"Ryan..."
"That's right," Ryan Phillips says, aiming a gun directly at Alexis' forehead. "Now, tell me. Is there any reason I shouldn't just go ahead and kill you now?"
"The good news is, these aren't from the mob," Katharine says, pushing the note across the desk. "I don't know too many mob bosses that send their threats on purple letterhead anyway."
Ryan nods. "Then it is letterhead?"
"From the looks of it, it came directly from Memorial. I've seen this before."
"I knew it!" Ryan says, slamming his fist onto the table. "I knew that bitch was behind these threats."
"Please refrain from calling women by that term in my presence."
"Sorry. But trust me, if you knew this girl, you'd call her the same thing," Ryan insists. "She ruined my life and the lives of so many people. And now what my brother has told me is right. She's going to be released from her padded cell and she wants revenge."
Katharine rises to her feet. "That's all well and good, but I'm not particularly interested in your personal life."
"I didn't mean to —"
"I'm doing this as a favor for your brother, because I owe him," Katharine continues. "But let me frank. I did a background check on you, Mr. Phillips. Involved with Vanessa Watson to the point where you purchased a ring to propose, but then you took up with a Samantha Clark. You began to purchase a house so you could raise your child together, but then she ended up in a coma and you ran back to Watson. How am I doing so far?"
Ryan glares at her. "I think I've heard enough."
Ignoring him, Katharine finishes, "But let's say, less than five minutes after you got hitched with Watson, you were charged with statutory rape. You had sex with one of your students. And yet, somehow, she's the one who ends up in a sanitarium? Yes, Mr. Phillips. I know all about what this bitch has done to you."
"I never had sex with a student. Those are all lies made up by a vile, manipulative young girl."
"You have what you need," Katharine says. "I'll contact you if I find anything further. Otherwise, we have nothing to discuss at the moment."
Ryan bites his tongue, keeping himself from responding to Katharine. He instead nods and snatches the note back from Katharine, walking toward the door.
Once he's gone from her office, Katharine picks up her cell phone and quickly dials a number. The phone rings several times before a man answers. "Phillips just left. I'll meet you in half an hour to discuss what I found."
MARQUETTE COVE MEMORIAL HOSPITAL
THE PRESENT
"You're crazy," Alexis says, coughing as she speaks. "You...you can't kill me."
"Can't I?" Ryan offers. "You killed Allison. You killed your father. You tried to kill Samantha."
"I've made mistakes."
Ryan scoffs. "Mistakes? That's putting it fucking lightly."
Alexis pulls her arm, struggling to escape from her handcuffs. But she only succeeds in tearing at her flesh, hurting herself even more in the tight handcuffs.
"Please let me go," Alexis says, her voice barely above a whisper. "I...I didn't mean the things that I did."
Ryan presses his gun against her forehead, digging it deep and nearly grinding against her skull. "You're sorry? You destroyed lives, Alexis. And then, you tricked people into believing you were sane. But you're not. You got a lick of freedom and you started gunning for me."
"I didn't..."
Ryan reaches into his pocket and retrieves a handwritten note, scribbled onto hospital letterhead. He shoves it in Alexis' face. "Tell me you didn't write this! Go ahead! Lie to me! Because no one would miss you if I killed you."
"Jessica, get a hold of yourself," Eric says, preventing her from getting past him by gripping her arm tightly. "That ceiling just caved in! Do you want to die like them?"
Jessica slaps Eric across the face. He isn't fazed, however, and the tears streaming down her own face are probably hurting her more than a blow to the face.
He feels...sorry for her loss.
"I'm sorry," Eric says. "But we need to get the hell out of here. This entire hospital is about to cave in...and if we don't get out of here...we're never going to..."
Eric darts his eyes around the room, searching for any kind of way out. He pulls Jessica closer as an electrical chord whips near them, firing sparks. His eyes finally rest on a tight space in the far corner.
"There," Eric whispers. "I have no idea where it leads, but...we might be able to crawl through there."
Jessica barely hears him, she continues to stare at the wreckage. Where her son is. He has to be...
"Jessica!"
She snaps to attention. "Huh?"
"The crawlspace," Eric says. "We have to get out of there."
"I can't lose him," Jessica says, wiping away tears. "I can't..."
MARQUETTE COVE HIGH SCHOOL
"...lose him," Alexis whispers, watching at the paramedics pull Samantha Clark away on a gurney.
As she stands, hand covering her mouth in shock, Alexis is startled as Damon Johnson approaches her. He eyes her suspiciously, noticing the fear in her face.
"What's wrong?" Damon demands, his voice a low whisper. "Did your father...did he hit you again?"
"No," Alexis says. "It's Ms. Clark. She was pushed down a flight of stairs."
"Oh...that's awful."
"How do you know she was pushed?" Jessica Reyes asked, appearing behind her best friend.
"I...I don't know," Alexis lies, pulling away from her friends. "I have to get to the hospital."
"The hospital? Have you been hurt?" Jessica asks.
"No, I just want to...I want to know what's happening with Ryan," Alexis says. "I mean, Samantha."
As Alexis hurries off, Damon tries to follow her. Instead he is stopped when Jessica grabs at his arm, turning him back to face her. "What's going on with Alexis? You've been spending a lot of time with her."
"We just understand each other, is all," Damon insists.
Jessica folds her arms. "Are you sleeping with her?"
"God, no," Damon says. "We're just friends."
Jessica sadly watches as her friend hurries out the building. "She definitely needs more of those."
MARQUETTE COVE MEMORIAL HOSPITAL
THE PRESENT
"I didn't write those notes," Alexis says, turning away from Ryan. She hides her expression from him, because it's not one of confusion, it's one of contemplation.
There's a slight chance that Kyle Maddock is responsible for the note Ryan received. It may have been his tactic for drawing Ryan out into the open, bringing him back to Marquette Cove.
"I didn't write it."
"Just like you didn't push my girlfriend down a flight of stairs?" Ryan counters.
"Which girlfriend would that be? Samantha? Or Vanessa? Or maybe some other woman?"
"I'm done playing your games," Ryan says.
"Yeah, well there won't be any games if you don't get me out of here! This entire hospital could come crashing down at any moment!"
Ryan glances up at the ceiling. There are enough cracks in it that make staying in one place dangerous. He can't do this in the hospital. They'll need to relocate. And then Ryan will get to the bottom of the threats he's been receiving.
Ryan reaches into his back pocket and removes a dangling set of keys. Then he grabs Alexis' arm, his eyes boring into her own.
"All right then. Let's go."
RYAN PHILLIPS' APARTMENT
NEW ORLEANS, LA
Ryan lets the door to his apartment swing shut as he tosses his onto the hallway table. He sifts through his mail, making sure to ignore the bills and stick them in the far corner of his mind until they actually need to be dealt with.
Concentrating on one particular piece of mail, he sets the rest down on the table and opens up a large envelope. After tearing it open Ryan finds a stack of photographs inside.
Photographs of himself.
"Shit."
There's a photograph of him outside his apartment. Then one of him from last week, when he met with a source that might have tied these threats to an organized crime family in New Orleans.
Ryan knew from his investigative reporting in the city that if he had actually pissed off someone in the resurgent New Orleans mafia, then he would already be dead. He wouldn't be receiving tame threats like this. Which means that Mrs. Harris was correct when she told him that he was of no importance to the mafia. He was barely scratching the surface, even after years of investigating.
Which meant that someone else was targeting Ryan. Someone else wanted him to be afraid.
"Wait...that's odd."
One of the photographs was of his brother, Grant. When Ryan moved to Chicago to attend college, his brother had already been living in the city. And while Ryan never had much of a relationship with his brother, he was concerned that whoever was threatening him was also keeping surveillance on his brother.
Ryan immediately pulls out his cell phone, where he has his travel agent's number on speed dial. "Looks like I'm going back to Chicago."
MARQUETTE COVE MEMORIAL HOSPITAL
THE PRESENT
"I wonder if this was an earthquake. Do you think it hit Chicago too?"
Jessica hears Eric speaking to her as crawls through the tight space, her eyes shut tightly to keep the smoke and debris from flying into them. She claws ahead with her hands, hoping that she will eventually come out the other end.
It feels as if she's been crawling for hours, but she knows she can't have been in the crawlspace for more than two minutes. And because of how horrified and emotionally wrecked she is, she's moving slower than normal.
Normal. As if escaping from a collapsing hospital were an everyday normal activity.
Finally finding nothing to press her arm against, Jessica realizes she has escaped the crawlspace. She climbs to her feet, taking a second to catch her breath. She still hasn't let what happened to Alec and Phillip sink in, because she's hoping against all hope that the were able to survive that ceiling caving in.
If they didn't...
"Jessica, are you okay?" Eric calls out.
Before she can respond, Jessica is startled by what she sees lying before her. It's a hospital patient lying in a bed, but the machines hooked up to the patient no longer seem to be working.
"How awful," Jessica says. "This person is going to die all because of...oh God."
She is taken aback when she realizes that she recognizes the patient. It is one of her former teachers from when she was a student at Marquette Cove High School. A woman she assumed would never awake from the coma she'd fallen into years ago.
"Miss Clark," Jessica gasps. "You're...you're still..."
Jessica is unable to finish her sentence, as the hospital begins to shake once more. She tries to dive for cover, but a large piece of debris from the ceiling falls and crashes into her head, knocking her to the floor.
"Jessica! Are you okay?!"
As Jessica lies on the floor, slipping into the unconsciousness, all she can hear are Eric's futile cries for as the hospital caves in around her.
