Chapter 2 - The Return of the Wolf
I didn't cry. Tears were for people who still had illusions to shatter; mine had been cauterized away by a burning cigarette on New Year's Eve.
Instead, a cold, crystalline focus took over. Every memory of the past three years replayed in my mind with sudden, terrifying clarity. The way Ryan had insisted I sign "simple household authorization papers" while I was recovering from a bad bout of morning sickness in my first trimester. The way Grant had always looked at my study doors—the room where I kept my hardware wallets and cold-storage crypto keys—with hungry, calculating eyes. They hadn't just planned to bleed me dry; they had planned to empty my accounts, frame me for financial insolvency, institutionalize me using forged psychiatric evaluations (which Marcus also found drafts of in Ryan’s cloud storage), and leave me penniless in a psychiatric ward while they walked away with my empire and custody of my unborn child.
“What are our options, Marcus?” I asked, sliding my coat tighter around my swollen belly.
“We trap them,” Marcus said, a slow, predatory smile spreading across his weathered face. “Right now, they think you’re terrified, hiding in a hospital, nursing a burn, and trying to figure out how to file for a messy divorce. They don’t know we’ve uncovered the mortgage fraud yet. If you go back there playing the victim, we give them enough rope to hang themselves.”
“I’m not playing a victim,” I said, standing up so fast the room spun slightly. “I’m going to hunt.”
By noon, I was back at the penthouse, but I didn't use the front door. I used my master override code through the service elevator, bypassing the main lobby where building security—who were already loyal to me after I tipped them a thousand dollars to secure the raw CCTV footage—kept watch.
The apartment was a disaster zone. The red wine stain still darkened the expensive Italian wool rug where I had pulled the table runner the night before. Shards of crystal glassware crunched beneath my designer boots as I walked through the silent living room.
The place was empty. Ryan and his family must have fled to their secondary bolt-hole—a suburban McMansion in Cherry Hills that I had also unknowingly been paying the property taxes on for the last two years.
I walked straight to the home office. The oak desk was locked, but a swift kick with the heel of my boot splintered the antique drawer frame. Inside, sitting right on top of a stack of blank tax forms, was Ryan’s laptop.
I plugged in my encrypted thumb drive, downloaded the local drive history, and synced every keystroke log, email archive, and financial ledger directly to Marcus’s secure server. As the progress bar ticked toward one hundred percent, my phone buzzed in my palm.
An incoming call from an unknown number.
I swiped and pressed it to my ear.
“Claire?” Ryan’s voice came through, trembling with a pathetic mix of false contrition and barely concealed panic. “Claire, please. Where are you? Dad is… Dad is furious, but I want to talk. We can fix this. Come home. Let’s talk about the baby.”
I looked around my ransomed, violated home—at the walls I painted, the floors I cleaned, the life I had built with my own two hands while these parasites plotted my ruin.
May you like
“I am home, Ryan,” I said softly into the receiver. “And I’m looking at your dad’s retirement plan right now. How does federal prison sound for a family vacation?”
The line went dead with a sharp click.
