Which meant it wasn’t a random car thief at all. If they had his number, they must have been targeting him – and his kids – specifically. But who the hell would do that?

He had no idea, but he did know one thing. This was planned. Someone had been watching, waiting for this opportunity.

The panic thickened, and his legs weakened. He let out a low groan. If this was planned, that meant there was a reason. Someone wanted his kids.

But the kids weren’t all they wanted, or the person behind it would not have sent him a message. They would just have disappeared.

So there was something else. But what? Was someone trying to punish him? He thought through all the areas of his life: family, friends, the law firm where he was a partner, any parents of the kids’ friends or classmates that they had fallen out with. Was there someone he had slighted? Or who the kids had upset?

It was possible, but he couldn’t think of anything, and surely anything sufficient to provoke this would have been obvious.

So what the fuck was going on?

In his hand, his phone buzzed.

I have his kids and his car. Easy to steal. Especially when you have the key. His spare, taken from the jar above the fridge in his kitchen, one day last summer when they were off on their family holiday. Too easy.

It’s time to let him know what’s happening.

Time to tear up everything he thought he knew and send him into a world of pain and confusion and fear.

I can’t wait. He’s had it coming for a long time.

I can’t use the same phone, though. Hopefully he’s not foolish enough to call the police, but there are no guarantees. The fucking idiot left his kids in an unlocked car, after all.

He assumed, like people do, that the world is safe. He assumed that what he sees around him every day – polite people, organized into nice little groups at work or at home, following the rules, saying please and thank you and worrying they might have upset someone – he assumed that this is how things are.

And he’s right. Most people are like that.

But not all. Some of us see the truth. Some of us see that other people are mere tools to be used to get what you want. The idea you might deny yourself something because it could hurt someone’s feelings is absurd. Why would you care about feelings? You either get what you want or you don’t. To let other people’s arbitrary emotional states obstruct you is foolishness. Worse, it is weakness.

And I am not weak. I was, once, and I learned my lesson. I suffered at the hands of someone who took what they wanted from me without a thought for what it did to me.