The Door Beyond the Wall

**The Door Beyond the Wall**

At 2:17 a.m. in Cell 17, Arjun Rao gets a note slid under his door: *"Don't trust the man who opens your door."* Beneath the words is a small black circle, a mark he last saw eleven years ago on the photograph that helped send him to prison for a murder he swears he didn't commit.

By morning, Arjun is free. But freedom lasts less than a minute. A black car is waiting outside the gate, a stranger's wrist carries that same black circle, and a voice on a phone he never owned tells him: *"You should have stayed inside."*

Then come a mysterious key stamped with the number 17, a "police" team with no badge numbers, and a dead man who may not be dead. Arjun and the one woman he can still trust start to see that his release wasn't mercy, and that his sentence may have been part of a plan. Someone has watched him for years and is waiting to see what he does next.

Every answer opens another locked door, and the man who framed him may be closer than he thinks.