Chapter 3: Room 17

Chapter 3: Room 17

The city’s sterile glow vanished in Simon’s rearview mirror, swallowed by the oppressive darkness of the Adirondack wilderness. For three hours, he’d driven north, fueled by black coffee and a cold, hard rage that had crystallized in his gut. The smooth hum of the interstate had given way to a cracked, two-lane highway that snaked through miles of dense, black forest. The pines stood like silent sentinels, their branches clawing at the bruised twilight sky. His phone had lost its signal an hour ago. He was utterly alone.

The coordinates had led him here, to this forgotten artery of the world. He was chasing a ghost, following a breadcrumb left in a digital labyrinth. Every rational instinct screamed at him to turn back, to call the police, to hire professionals. But this was beyond rational. Lena had not just stolen his money; she had hollowed out his reality, making him grieve for a daughter who never was. This wasn't about recovery. This was about reclamation. He needed to know the truth, no matter how ugly.

A flicker of light broke through the trees. A neon sign, sputtering bravely against the encroaching night. Half the letters were dead, leaving a ghostly message: Blac Pines Mo el.

Simon pulled off the highway, his tires crunching over gravel and neglect. The Black Pines Motel was a U-shaped relic of another era, a festering wound of peeling paint and water-stained wood. The windows of the guest rooms were dark, vacant eyes staring out at nothing. A profound sense of rot hung in the air, a mixture of damp earth, pine needles, and decay. This wasn't a place for travelers. This was a place where things ended.

The office light was on, but a faded, handwritten sign taped to the glass read, “Take key. Leave cash in box.” The front desk was empty. A key rack hung on the wall behind it, a few tarnished brass keys dangling from their hooks. It was a place built on a desperate, and likely foolish, kind of trust.

He didn't need a key from the office. He was looking for a specific room. The file name from the encrypted data packet echoed in his mind: R17.

He stepped out into the courtyard. The air was cold and heavy, carrying the scent of imminent rain. His footsteps on the cracked asphalt were unnervingly loud in the dead silence. Room 10. Room 12. The numbers were faded, barely legible. He moved along the covered walkway, the shadows clinging to him like a shroud. He felt watched, a primal instinct that made the hairs on his arms stand up.

He found it at the far corner of the U, a position that offered a strategic view of the entire parking lot. Room 17. The door was a darker shade of grime than the others, the brass number seventeen tarnished almost black. Scratches marred the wood around the lock, old wounds from fumbled keys or forced entries. This was the place. The end of the digital trail.

He reached for the doorknob, his heart hammering against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat in the oppressive quiet.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

The voice came from the shadows beside him, low and raspy. Simon flinched back, spinning around. A woman emerged from the darkness, melting away from the deeper gloom of the walkway. She was thin and wiry, wrapped in a dark hooded jacket despite the mild evening. Her face was pale and haunted in the weak glow of the neon sign, her dark hair pulled back severely. But it was her eyes that held him—sharp, intelligent, and radiating a weary paranoia that seemed to have been etched there by years of looking over her shoulder. She held a heavy, steel tire iron in one hand, gripping it not like a tool, but like a weapon.

“Who are you?” Simon demanded, his voice tight.

“A better question is, who are you?” she countered, taking a small step forward. Her eyes scanned him from head to toe, a rapid, clinical assessment. “You don’t look like one of them. Too clean. Too… lost.”

“One of who?”

She ignored his question. “What do you want with Room 17?”

Simon’s mind raced. This had to be a trap. An ambush. But the woman didn’t look like a common thug. She looked like a survivor. He decided to gamble. “I was sent here. By a set of coordinates.”

A flicker of something—recognition? pity?—crossed her face before the hard mask of suspicion snapped back into place. “Who sent you?”

He took a breath. “Lena.”

The name landed in the space between them with the weight of a physical object. The woman’s grip on the tire iron tightened, her knuckles white.

“And what’s your name?” she asked, her voice dangerously soft.

This was the final test. The key that would either open a door or get his skull caved in. “Simon Fletcher. Lena told me… she told me I had a daughter. With a woman named Cassandra Ellis.”

The woman’s shoulders slumped, just for a second, a near-imperceptible release of tension. A harsh, bitter laugh escaped her lips, a sound utterly devoid of humor. “You poor, stupid bastard,” she said, the words a strange mix of venom and sympathy. “You actually came.”

She stepped closer, finally lowering the tire iron. “Get away from that door. Now.” She jerked her head towards the room next door, Number 16. “In here.”

She unlocked her own door and pushed him inside, shutting and bolting it behind them. The room was spartan, stripped of any personal effects save for a laptop on the small desk and a duffel bag on the floor. It smelled of stale coffee and antiseptic cleaner.

“There is no Cassandra Ellis,” she said, her back against the door, her eyes never leaving his. “Not really. It’s a designation. A file name for a project. I was Cassandra Ellis before Lena reassigned it to your file.”

Simon stared at her, the pieces clicking into place with sickening clarity. The ghost account. The reason he could find no trace of her. It was all part of the script. “Then who are you?”

“A ghost,” she said flatly. “A loose end they never managed to tie up. And you’re the new one.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “You think this was about money, don’t you? You think your wife was some high-class con artist who took you for a ride?”

“Wasn’t she?”

Her laugh was even harsher this time. “A con artist? Simon, that’s like calling a shark a fish. It’s true, but it misses the entire goddamn point. Lena isn't a solo act. She’s an operative. A recruiter. Part of a shadowy organization that is terrifyingly good at what it does.”

She began to pace the small room, her movements like a caged animal. “They find men like you. Men with money, yes, but more importantly, with a weakness they can exploit. Loneliness. A desire for family. A trusting nature. They study you for months, build a perfect partner for you from the ground up, and then they send her in. She becomes your world. And when the time is right, she burns it to the ground and takes everything of value with her. Your money, your assets, your trust in other human beings.”

Everything she said resonated with the cold, clinical nature of the letters in the black box. This was the truth he had been searching for, and it was a hundred times more monstrous than he had imagined.

“Why here?” Simon asked, his voice barely a whisper. “Why send me to this motel?”

She stopped pacing and turned to face him, her eyes dark with a terrible knowledge.

“Because this is where the game changes. Most of the time, the target just breaks. They’re too ashamed, too destroyed to fight back. But sometimes… sometimes a target gets curious. They start digging. They become a problem.” Her gaze flickered towards the wall separating them from Room 17. “This place? The Black Pines? This is their hunting ground. This is where they bring the problems, the loose ends, to be… cleaned up.”

Simon’s blood ran cold. The coordinates weren’t a clue. The name ‘R17’ wasn't a taunt.

“She didn’t send you here to find answers,” Cassandra said, her voice dropping to a near-whisper. “She sent you here to be erased.”