Chapter 1 - SIX FRACTURES
“Her jaw is broken in six places.”
Frank Collins stared at the X-ray held beneath the cold hospital light.
Six white fractures cut through his daughter’s jaw.
Maya lay motionless beneath the blankets, her head wrapped in bandages. One eye was swollen shut. An IV disappeared beneath the tape on her arm, while the monitor behind her counted every fragile heartbeat.
Frank had spent twenty-four years in the Army.
He had survived roadside explosions, night raids, and the long silence that followed the deaths of men he could not bring home.
Nothing had prepared him to see his twenty-one-year-old daughter like this.
He sat beside her and held her hand with both of his.
“Who did this to you?”
Maya could not answer.
Her jaw had been wired after emergency surgery. When she tried to move her lips, pain tightened across her face.
A tear slipped down her bruised cheek.
Frank leaned closer.
“You don’t have to speak. Just stay with me.”
Her fingers tightened weakly around his.
On the chair beside the bed sat a clear evidence bag containing Maya’s dirty blue hoodie.
Her backpack had been found near the science building. Her laptop was missing. Her phone had been discovered beneath a stairwell with its screen cracked.
Frank looked at the hoodie.
Then at his daughter.
The grief inside him changed shape.
It became cold.
Maya lifted one trembling hand and pointed toward her phone.
Frank picked it up.
A video file was attempting to upload through the hospital Wi-Fi.
Only eleven percent had completed.
Beneath it was Maya’s final message:
SCIENCE BUILDING. CAMERAS ARE OFF.
Frank felt the doctor stop behind him.
Maya struggled to make a sound.
“They…” she whispered through clenched teeth. “Knew.”
A campus detective entered carrying a tablet.
“We recovered a backup feed from a service hallway.”
He turned the screen toward Frank.
The video showed a shadowy figure standing near the science-building door at 11:42 p.m.
The person wore a dark university hoodie with a white patch stitched across the left elbow.
Frank stopped breathing.
Three months earlier, he had repaired that exact tear by hand for someone he trusted.
“I know that jacket.”
The detective enlarged the image.
Frank recognized the clothing.
But when the figure turned slightly, something about the body did not match the person who owned it.
May you like
Someone had chosen that hoodie because they wanted Frank to recognize it.
👉 The jacket pointed to a young veteran Frank loved like family—but Maya’s frightened eyes were already telling him the evidence had been planted.
