BUILT ON BONES

Chapter three

Marcus hit the bottom of the crack hard.

Six feet wasn't far, but landing on broken concrete with a dislocated shoulder and a bad knee turned it into agony. His legs buckled. He rolled instinctively, years of childhood clumsiness teaching him how to fall without breaking bones, and came to rest inches from the skeleton.

This close, he could see everything. The cave-in on the left side of the skull. The expensive fabric of what had once been a three-thousand-dollar suit, now rotted to rags. The platinum necklace still gleaming despite fifteen years in the dark. And underneath it all, the concrete—stained dark where blood had mixed with wet cement, creating a chemical bond that had literally poisoned the foundation from within.

"Chen!" Davies's voice came from above, his flashlight beam cutting down into the crack. "Don't make this harder than it has to be!"

Marcus didn't answer. He pressed his good hand against the stained concrete, right where Victor Hutchinson Sr.'s blood had soaked into the foundation.

The vision hit him like a tidal wave.

Rain. Darkness. The construction pit.

But this time Marcus wasn't watching from a distance. He was IN the memory, experiencing it from Victor Sr.'s perspective. He could feel the rain soaking through the expensive suit, feel the terror rising in his chest, feel the betrayal cutting deeper than any physical wound.

"Victor, please," Marcus heard himself say—no, heard Victor Sr. say, through his own mouth. "I'm your father. Everything I built, I built for you. For our family."

Junior stood there in the rain, his face a mask of contempt. "You built it for yourself. To feel righteous. To play philanthropist with money you didn't earn—Grandfather earned it. You just inherited it and decided to throw it away."

"I decided to use it for good." Victor Sr.'s voice cracked. Marcus felt the old man's desperation, his confusion at how his son had become this. "The trust will ensure the Hutchinson name means something beyond profit. It will help people. Build communities. Create affordable housing—"

"It will make us WEAK." Junior took a step closer. "Do you know what the other developers say about you? They laugh. They call you a bleeding heart. A fossil. They're circling like sharks, waiting for you to die so they can carve up your empire."

"Then let them. Money isn't—"

"Money is EVERYTHING." Junior's voice was ice. "It's power. Control. Legacy. You want to piss it away on welfare projects and charity cases? Fine. But you're not taking me down with you."

Victor Sr. felt his heart pounding. Something was wrong. This wasn't just an argument. His son's eyes were too calm, too flat. This was planned.

"What did you do?" Victor Sr. whispered.

Junior smiled. "I had the will challenged. Found three psychiatrists who'll testify you're not competent to make financial decisions. Had your lawyers tied up in depositions. Made sure the trust paperwork has holes big enough to drive a truck through." He pulled out his phone. "And when you disappear tonight, everyone will assume you ran off. Couldn't handle the pressure. Maybe embezzled some money and fled to the Caymans."

"You can't—"

"I already have." Junior's voice was conversational, like discussing the weather. "There are twelve other people who got in my way over the years. Contractors who threatened to expose safety violations. Union organizers who wanted fair wages. A journalist who was writing an exposé about my building practices. They're all buried in my foundations now. You'll be number thirteen."

The revelation hit Marcus—hit Victor Sr.—like a physical blow. Twelve others. His son was a serial killer.

"My God," Victor Sr. breathed. "What happened to you?"

"Nothing happened. I woke up." Junior gestured at the construction pit around them. "Grandfather understood. Build empires, not charities. The weak serve the strong. That's nature."

Victor Sr. stumbled backward, his dress shoe slipping in the mud. He wasn't trying to run—just recoiling from the monster his son had become. His foot caught on the rebar jutting from the foundation.

He fell.

Time slowed. Marcus felt Victor Sr.'s arms windmill uselessly, felt gravity take over, felt the terrible certainty that this was how it ended. Not murdered deliberately, but killed by his own son's callousness, dying because Junior wouldn't even bother to catch him.

The back of his skull hit the concrete foundation.

Pain exploded through Marcus's head—not phantom pain, not memory-burn, but REAL pain, as if his own skull had cracked open. He gasped, tried to scream, but Victor Sr.'s dying nervous system was shutting down too fast. The rain hitting his face felt distant. Junior's shoes—Italian leather, expensive—appeared in his fading vision, standing over him.

"You could call for help," Victor Sr. managed to whisper, blood filling his mouth. "Please. I'm your father."

Junior crouched down, his face appearing in Victor Sr.'s dimming sight. "No. You're an obstacle. And I remove obstacles."

He pulled out his phone. Made the call. Ordered the cement truck.

Then he just stood there. Watching. Waiting.

Victor Sr.'s last thought, as consciousness faded and his heart stuttered and the rain mixed with his blood, was regret. Not for himself. For his wife, who would die of heartbreak within six months, knowing what their son was. For all the people his son would kill after this. For the victims already buried in concrete graves across the city.

For the world his son would inherit.

Marcus screamed and jerked his hand away from the concrete.

He was back in the present, at the bottom of the crack, his own skull feeling like it had been split open. Blood ran from his nose—pushed too hard, saw too much, experienced actual death instead of just witnessing it. His vision swam. Nausea rolled through him.

But now he knew.

Twelve others. Hutchinson had admitted it in that moment, thinking his father would die before telling anyone. Twelve bodies buried in twelve buildings across the city.

Marcus fumbled for his phone with shaking hands. Pulled up the voice recording app. Hit record.

"This is Marcus Chen, building inspector, October seventh, 2025," he gasped, his voice hoarse. "I'm at Celestial Heights Tower, in the parking garage foundation. I've found the body of Victor Hutchinson Senior, murdered fifteen years ago by his son, Victor Hutchinson Junior. The body is buried in the northeast corner foundation, identifiable by platinum necklace with engraving. Cause of death: blunt force trauma to skull, left to bleed out. Killer admitted to twelve other murders, victims buried in construction projects across the city—"

"Shut up!" Hutchinson's voice came from above, panicked now. "Davies, get down there! Stop him!"

Marcus kept recording. "Killer is present at scene, attempting to silence witness. This recording is being uploaded to cloud storage—" He tapped frantically at his phone with his good hand, sending the file to his email, to Bridgemont's servers, to every backup he could think of. "—and will serve as evidence in the event of my death—"

Davies dropped into the crack beside him. The big man's hand shot out, grabbing for the phone.

Marcus threw it.

The phone tumbled through the air, over Davies's head, and landed on the other side of the crack. In the darkness beyond the flashlight beams. Out of reach.

"You idiot!" Davies snarled, grabbing Marcus by his injured shoulder.

The pain was nuclear. Marcus's vision went white. He heard himself screaming, the sound echoing in the concrete tomb of the parking garage.

Then the building shifted.

Not settled. SHIFTED. The entire structure lurched sideways like a ship hitting a wave. The crack widened with a sound like a gunshot. Davies stumbled, his grip loosening. Above them, the ceiling groaned—that deep subsonic rumble that Marcus had felt since he first touched the lobby floor.

The parking garage was collapsing.

"Get out!" Hutchinson was shouting from above. "Everyone out! NOW!"

Davies looked up, his face pale in the emergency lighting. The professional mask cracked. For the first time, Marcus saw real fear in the man's eyes.

"Sir, the whole structure is going—"

"I don't care about the structure! Get Chen and that phone and GET OUT!"

But Davies was already moving, scrambling back toward the stairwell exit. Self-preservation overrode orders. The other two guards were already gone, running for their lives.

Which left Marcus alone at the bottom of the crack with a skeleton and a phone somewhere in the darkness, while the building came down around him.

He could hear Hutchinson above, screaming obscenities, but even the developer knew when to cut losses. Footsteps pounded away toward the exit.

The ceiling groaned again. Closer. Louder.

Marcus forced himself to move. His shoulder was useless, his knee screaming, blood still running from his nose. He crawled through the darkness on his belly, good hand outstretched, searching for the phone.

His fingers touched plastic.

He grabbed it, pulled it close, saw the screen was cracked but still lit. The recording was still going. Thirty-seven minutes of audio. The whole confrontation, the whole confession, everything.

A chunk of concrete the size of a refrigerator fell from the ceiling and crashed five feet to his left.

Marcus looked up. Through the widening crack, he could see multiple floors now. The building's internal structure was visible—support beams twisted like taffy, floors sagging, walls crumbling. Celestial Heights Tower was tearing itself apart from the foundation up, the violence buried in its bones finally causing catastrophic failure.

And Marcus was trapped at ground zero.

He looked at Victor Sr.'s skeleton, at the platinum necklace gleaming in his phone's light.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry this happened to you. I'm sorry your son became this. But I promise—if I survive this, I'll make sure everyone knows the truth. I'll find the others. All twelve of them. I'll give them all a voice."

The skeleton didn't answer. Of course it didn't.

But Marcus felt something. Not a vision, not a memory. Just a sense of... acknowledgment. As if the building itself—or the violence soaked into it, or the ghost of the man buried here—understood.

Then the ceiling came down, and everything went black.