Chapter 2

Sophia left for a three-day business trip to Shanghai. She kissed my scarred cheek at the door, her touch feeling like a spider crawling on my skin.

"I'll miss you, Ethan," she said, her voice smooth as silk. "Dr. Chen said you're making wonderful progress."

I forced a small, weak smile. "I'll be fine. Just focus on your work."

The moment the door clicked shut, the smile vanished from my face. The house was a silent, sprawling cage of glass and white marble. Her cage. Her compensation.

I went to our bedroom, the one I had slept in alone since our wedding night. She always said she wanted to give me space to heal. Now I knew the truth. The space was for her real life, the one I was never meant to see.

I started to pack a small bag, a symbolic gesture at first. A few changes of clothes, the cheap paperback I was reading. It was a way to tell myself I was leaving. As I opened the drawers of the dresser she had bought for me, my hand brushed against something hard at the back.

It was a single cufflink, silver with a small, black onyx stone. It wasn't mine. I knew exactly who it belonged to. Mark Johnson had worn them at his wedding to Chloe. I remembered because I had given them to him as a best man's gift, back when I was a fool.

A wave of nausea washed over me. He had been here. In this house. In this room.

My hands started to shake, not with weakness, but with a surge of adrenaline. Sophia' s entire mansion was a fortress of her own technology. Smart systems, integrated security. She had taught me how to use the basic interface, thinking of it as a toy for her broken pet. She never imagined I' d spend my long, empty days learning its every secret.

I went to her home office, a place I was never supposed to enter. Her main computer was locked down with biometric security I couldn't bypass. But the central server for the house's security footage was a different system. A system I had already cracked.

I typed in the commands, my fingers flying across the virtual keyboard on the wall-mounted screen. I bypassed her personal firewalls and accessed the archive. I didn't search for the day of Leo's death. That was too far back, and the evidence likely wiped. I searched for something more recent.

I picked a date from two weeks ago, a night she told me she was working late at the office.

A video file loaded. The camera angle was from the corner of our bedroom. My bedroom.

The video started. Sophia walked in, shrugging off her coat. A moment later, Mark Johnson followed her. He closed the door, and she turned and wrapped her arms around his neck. They kissed, a hungry, desperate kiss that made my stomach clench.

I watched as they undressed each other and fell onto the bed. My bed. The bed I was supposed to be healing in. The sounds were muffled, but the images were brutally clear. They were not just lovers; they were comfortable, familiar, their movements practiced.

This was their routine.

The camera captured their faces. Mark, laughing, triumphant. Sophia, looking at him with an obsessive adoration that she never once showed me. They were celebrating something. I turned up the volume, straining to hear their words through the static.

"...the Davis family is finally secure," Mark was saying, stroking her hair. "Chloe's father is pushing my promotion."

"I told you it would work," Sophia murmured. "Everything went according to plan."

The plan. The plan that started with a dead seventeen-year-old boy. The plan that destroyed my family. The plan that left me a crippled, scarred monster.

I sank to the floor, my bad leg screaming in protest. The images replayed in my head. Leo's twisted body in the pit. My father's broken voice on the phone. My mother weeping as the bank repossessed our home. The feeling of the brick wall against my face, the crunch of bone, the taste of my own blood.

I thought I had found a savior. I thought I had a future. It was all a lie. A carefully constructed stage for their sick romance. My entire existence for the past year had been a footnote in their story.

I was nothing more than a prop. A tool to be used and discarded.

A soft chime echoed through the house. The front gate. I looked at the security monitor. My breath caught in my throat.

A black car had pulled up. A woman got out, her face a familiar portrait of cold arrogance.

It was Mrs. Davis. Chloe's mother. And she was walking towards the front door.