Up the broken stairs.
Past ripped wallpaper.
Past a locked door hanging crooked on one hinge.
“Dad?”
He heard it again — weaker this time, frightened, almost like the child himself was afraid to believe it.
The man slammed his shoulder into the upstairs door.
Once.
Twice.
On the third hit, the wood split open.
Inside, on a thin mattress in the corner of a bare room, sat his son.
Alive.
Pale. Dirty. Terrified.
For one shattered second, neither of them moved.
Then the boy launched himself forward so hard he nearly fell, and the father dropped to his knees and caught him in both arms, sobbing into the child’s hair like the world had just been handed back to him.
“I’m here,” he kept saying. “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”
But then the boy pulled away just enough to grab his father’s jacket with trembling fingers.
“Don’t be loud,” he whispered. “She says she can hear everything.”
The father’s blood went cold.
He looked around the room.
There were children’s drawings on the wall.
Not one child’s.
Several.
A metal tray with pills.
A camera in the corner.
And beside the mattress… a small pair of shoes that did not belong to his son.
The little girl from the alley had followed him in. She stood in the doorway holding her breath.
“She took other boys too,” she said softly. “But they leave.”
The father turned slowly.
“Leave where?”
The girl pointed to a wardrobe shoved against the wall.
Behind it, hidden in the plaster, was a second door.
A reinforced one.
The father moved the wardrobe aside with shaking hands and found six names scratched into the paint.
His son’s was the newest.
Just below it was one more word carved by a child:
BASEMENT.
That was when the building’s front door slammed downstairs.
Heavy footsteps entered.
A woman’s voice rose through the rotting stairwell, calm and sharp:
“Lina? I know you brought someone.”
The little girl in the blue dress went white.
The father grabbed his son and pulled him behind him.
Then the girl whispered the sentence that made everything even worse:
“She’s not my mother.”