Chapter 7 - The Mastermind
I stared at Leo in absolute horror as the reality of his betrayal slowly sank in.
I aggressively pulled the door handle, but the child safety locks held firmly in place.
I screamed at him, demanding to know how much Ethan had paid him to trade my life.
Leo reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small electronic key fob.
He pressed a button, and the heavy metal garage door of the warehouse slowly rolled down, plunging us into total darkness.
Leo turned on the interior dome light of the car and let out a long, heavy sigh.
He turned to me and said he was just making sure we were not being tracked by Ethan's men.
He pressed the unlock button on the dashboard, and the heavy doors instantly clicked open.
Leo explained that he was absolutely not working for Ethan.
He had driven us to this remote location to meet someone who could finally end this nightmare.
A side door in the warehouse opened, and a man carrying a glowing laptop walked toward the car.
Leo introduced the man as Marcus, a former intelligence officer turned private investigator.
Marcus climbed into the back seat and immediately opened his laptop to show me his findings.
He explained that he had successfully hacked into Ethan's heavily encrypted personal laptop.
Marcus revealed that Ethan and Arthur were not the true masterminds behind the embezzlement scheme.
They were actually desperate pawns caught in a much larger and deadlier game.
Ethan had developed a massive underground gambling addiction over the past four years.
He had racked up nearly ten million dollars in debt to a brutal international crime syndicate.
The cartel had threatened to execute Ethan and Patricia if the debt was not paid in full by the end of the week.
Ethan forged the documents and framed me because stealing my trust fund was his only way to survive.
Marcus showed me a series of threatening emails sent to Ethan by the cartel boss.
The final email stated that the cartel would accept the deed to my house as a down payment for the remaining debt.
That was the real reason Ethan was so desperate to force me into signing the divorce papers tonight.
If he failed to secure the property by tomorrow morning, the cartel was going to kill him.
Marcus typed a few commands into his terminal and intercepted a live GPS signal from Ethan's phone.
He warned us that Ethan had just realized I escaped the hospital and was currently tracking my location.
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Suddenly, the reinforced steel doors of the warehouse blew open with a deafening explosion.
Three heavily armed tactical vehicles roared into the building, shining blinding spotlights directly at our car.
