Chapter 8 - The Betrayal Game
My heart pounded so fiercely against my chest that I thought it would crack my ribs.
I quickly slid the damning receipt deep into my coat pocket before Natalie turned back around.
She smiled warmly at me, offering a perfect, sickening imitation of the best friend I thought I knew.
She told me we were going up to the sixty-fifth floor to meet a trusted contact who could decrypt the drive.
I simply nodded, forcing my face to pretend everything was perfectly fine.
My mind raced at a million miles an hour to connect the terrifying, deadly dots.
If Natalie was secretly working for Daniel, then rescuing me from the country club wasn't an act of protection at all.
It was a highly calculated move to gain my absolute, unquestioning trust.
She desperately needed me to willingly log into the encrypted drive using my unique biometric thumb scan.
Once the files were unlocked and permanently destroyed, Daniel would have absolutely zero loose ends.
And then Natalie would kill me, framing it perfectly as the tragic suicide of a guilty, embezzling wife.
We stepped into the sleek glass elevator, and Natalie pressed the glowing button for the penthouse floor.
I knew I had less than two minutes before the doors opened and I walked directly into my own grave.
I looked down at the encrypted hard drive resting heavily in my hands.
I casually asked Natalie if this mysterious contact of hers was truly trustworthy.
She confidently assured me he was the absolute best in the business and entirely off the grid.
As the rising elevator smoothly passed the fortieth floor, I made my desperate move.
I deliberately dropped the heavy hard drive onto the metal floor.
Natalie instantly bent down to pick it up, her combat training making her react reflexively to the falling object.
I didn't hesitate for a single second.
I slammed my elbow directly into the back of her neck with every ounce of physical strength I possessed.
She gasped violently, her head slamming hard against the reinforced glass wall of the elevator.
Before she could even begin to recover, I kicked her viciously in the stomach.
She crumpled to the floor, coughing up blood and gasping wildly for air.
I mashed the red emergency stop button on the main control panel.
The elevator lurched to a violent, screaming halt squarely between two floors.
I grabbed the hard drive and the red emergency pry bar mounted securely on the wall.
Natalie wheezed heavily, reaching desperately for the concealed weapon hidden inside her jacket.
I swung the heavy iron bar with all my might, striking her hand and sending the gun clattering across the floor.
I screamed that I knew about the money Daniel had paid her to ruin my life.
Natalie spit a mouthful of blood onto the floor and started laughing hysterically.
She looked up at me with a sickeningly cruel, victorious smile.
She said Daniel didn't pay her two hundred and forty thousand dollars to kill me.
He paid her to keep me alive just long enough to take the fall for the brutal murder he committed an hour ago.
My phone suddenly buzzed loudly in my pocket with a severe emergency news alert.
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I pulled it out and stared at the breaking local headline.
Claire Halstead had just been found brutally murdered in her luxury apartment, and the prime suspect caught on camera fleeing the bloody scene was me.
