My mother let out a strangled, breathless gasp. She looked from me, to the photograph, to Mason, and then back to me. The delusion she had wrapped herself in for a lifetime was disintegrating in real-time.
They had thought I was weak. They had assumed my grief would blind me. They didn’t know that for the last seventy-two hours, I hadn’t just been mourning. I had been a ghost haunting my own life. I had methodically liquidated every shared asset my parents had access to. I had moved my own money into
impenetrable, blind trusts. And, most importantly, I had made a phone call to Daniel’s best friend—a senior agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
I had built a trap, and they had walked right into the center of it, blinded by their own greed.
As the horrific, inescapable truth set in, the panic finally overrode their shock. My mother’s face contorted into an ugly, feral mask of desperation.
“Give me that!” she shrieked, lunging across the dining table. Her manicured hands clawed wildly, desperately trying to snatch the folder, to destroy the evidence.
But I simply stepped back, fluidly pulling the folder out of her reach. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small, heavy electronic fob. Daniel had installed the system just weeks prior, a security measure he said we needed because “things at work were getting complicated.”
I pressed the single, red button in the center of the fob.
Deep within the walls of the house, heavy hydraulic gears engaged with a deep, resonant hum.
Clank. Clank. Clank.
Thick, solid titanium security shutters slammed down over the living room windows, plunging the house into twilight. Another shutter dropped over the glass patio doors. And finally, with a deafening, metallic thud, a reinforced steel sheath dropped down and locked into place directly over the inside of the
front door.
My parents and brother spun around, trapped in a sudden, claustrophobic darkness, illuminated only by the dim hallway chandelier.
“Don’t bother,” I murmured.
