Elias leaned back, his chair creaking.
“If you’re right, Sarah, he’s not just drugging you. He’s liquidating you. Every night you’re out, he’s likely taking things from this house or your father’s office and selling them off market. He’s emptying the vault before he burns the building down.”
“How do we catch him?”
I asked.
“We don’t catch him,”
Elias said with a cold grin.
“We let him think he’s already won. We give him exactly what he wants. A public episode so big he thinks it’s the final nail in your coffin. That’s when we strike.”
At this point, I only thought I found the eye in the ceiling. But now I was about to find the rot in his heart. Most people think the hardest part of being betrayed is the moment you find out. They’re wrong. The hardest part is the acting. It’s sitting across from a man who is actively trying to erase your mind and asking him if he wants more salt on his potatoes. I waited for Friday. Every Friday at 6:00 p.m., Mark goes to the gym for two hours. It’s his me time. Usually, I’d be upstairs in a drug-induced coma while he was gone. But tonight, the tea in his belly was the tea he’d prepared for me.
As I watched his car pull out of the driveway, I didn’t feel relief. I felt a cold, sharp focus. I had 120 minutes to clone his life, or I’d spend the rest of mine in a facility he chose for me. I ran to his home office. My hands were shaking so hard I nearly dropped the device Elias gave me. I found his spare phone, the one he thought I didn’t know about, hidden inside a hollowed-out book on his shelf. “The Wealth of Nations.” How fitting.
I plugged the cloner in. A blue light began to pulse. 10%, 20%. Every second felt like an hour. I kept looking at the window, expecting his car to swing back into the driveway. What if he forgot his headphones? What if he had a bad feeling? My forensic brain was screaming at me to move faster, but technology has its own pace. At 95%, my phone buzzed. A text from Elias.
“I’m in. I’m seeing his messages in real time. Sarah, get out of that office now.”
I pulled the device, shoved the phone back into the book, and sprinted to the kitchen. I barely sat down and took a sip of plain, safe water before I heard the garage door groan open. He was back.
“Forgot my water bottle!”
he shouted, walking in, sweating and smiling. He looked at me, then at the half-empty cup of tea on the counter.
“Finished your tea already? Good girl. You look tired. Why don’t you head up?”
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