Chapter 3 - THE WEAPONIZATION OF TRUTHBy the following afternoon, Gregory and Jocelyn were spiraling into total paranoia. They had spent the entire night trying to locate me, calling local hospitals under fake names, but Ethan’s team had scrubbed my name from every public registry.
Worse for them, their primary bank accounts were freezing up one by one. Yet, bound by their immense vanity, they couldn't bring themselves to cancel the annual Charity Gala. To cancel would invite questions, and to Jocelyn, public image was more important than life itself.
“She’s just trying to scare us, Gregory!” Jocelyn shrieked as she paced through her master bedroom, adjusting a diamond necklace that had been purchased using money stolen from my medical care fund. “The bitch has nowhere to go! Her brother is a nobody! She probably dragged herself to some cheap motel to die!”
“Mom, the IRS hit us with three subpoenas this morning!” Gregory yelled back, pulling violently at his tuxedo tie. “And the drains—I threw her drains in the kitchen trash! If someone finds those with her blood on them—”
“Then you say she went insane!” Jocelyn snapped, her voice cutting through the room like a whip. “You say she was hallucinating from the cancer treatments and mutilated herself! The church board believes me, not her. As long as we look spotless at the gala tonight, the board will approve our five-million-dollar grant before midnight. Once that money clears, we take the private jet to Cayman.”
Inside the black limousine parked three blocks away, I sat wrapped in a tailored silk pantsuit, carefully concealing my medical dressings. Headphones rested on my ears, feeding me every word spoken inside their house.
Ethan sat beside me, sipping dark coffee. “You hear that? They plan to frame you as mentally unstable.”
“Let them try,” I said, my voice deadpan. “Do you have the audio files ready?”
“Not just the audio,” Ethan smiled wickedly. “We have the high-definition security footage from the bathroom.”
My heart skipped a beat. “The camera caught it?”
“Every single second,” Ethan confirmed, leaning over to show me the video on his monitor.
There it was, in crisp, undeniable 4K clarity: Jocelyn holding the skeleton key, smugly flushing my life-saving painkillers down the toilet while I writhed on the floor in agony. And then Gregory stepping over my body, violently yanking the surgical drains from my chest, causing blood to splatter onto his khakis, before tossing them into the trash bin like garbage.
It was horrifying to watch, but it was absolute, unassailable proof of felony domestic torture and attempted murder.
“If we hand this to the police now, they’ll just arrest them quietly,” I said, staring at the screen. “Gregory will hire top-tier defense attorneys, post bail within hours, and spin the narrative in the press before the trial even begins.”
“Precisely,” Ethan agreed. “Public opinion is a weapon, Clara. If you destroy a monster in the dark, they become a martyr. But if you destroy them in the light, in front of everyone they ever tried to impress... they never recover.”
“How is the media setup?” I asked.
“The gala is being live-streamed by three local news stations and broadcast to over two hundred thousand followers on the diocese’s official Facebook page,” Ethan replied, his fingers flying across his keyboard. “My tech team has successfully hijacked the main AV feed at the convention center. At precisely 8:30 PM, when Gregory takes the microphone to accept his leadership award, the entire feed will be overridden.”
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I looked at my watch. It was 7:45 PM.
“Let's go,” I said, standing up despite the dull ache in my side. “I want to be in the room when the lights go out.”
