Chapter 5 - The Sister's Trap
Vance drove the armored SUV through the winding alleyways with dangerous, practiced speed.
I sat in the back seat, completely overwhelmed by the massive web of lies my life had become.
My husband was a monster, my mother-in-law was an assassin, and my supposedly dead sister-in-law was now my savior.
We arrived at a desolate industrial park on the outskirts of the city just as the sun began to set.
Vance led me into a massive, abandoned warehouse that had been converted into a high-tech command center.
Computers lined the walls, displaying live feeds of my bank accounts, my home, and my personal cell phone.
A tall woman with sharp features and piercing green eyes stepped out from the shadows.
She looked exactly like the old photographs James kept of his late sister, Sarah.
Sarah did not offer me a hug or any warm words of comfort.
She bluntly told me that we had less than twenty-four hours to dismantle her family's criminal empire.
She handed me a thick dossier containing evidence of three other women who had vanished after marrying James.
Each woman had a pre-existing medical condition that tragically claimed their lives shortly after updating their wills.
Sarah explained that she had been gathering this evidence for a decade while hiding in Europe.
She needed me to access James's encrypted laptop to retrieve the final master ledger.
I told her I left the house so quickly I did not grab anything except my purse.
Sarah smirked and typed a command into her keyboard, bringing up a live feed of my living room.
James was furiously tearing the house apart, searching for the hidden camera Vance had disabled.
Sarah revealed that she had hired Vance to break into my house three days ago.
Vance had successfully swapped James's real laptop with a perfect replica.
Sarah pointed to a silver computer sitting on the metal table right in front of me.
She needed my fingerprint to unlock the administrative firewall James had installed.
I pressed my thumb against the biometric scanner, praying this nightmare was almost over.
The screen flashed green, and thousands of highly classified files began rapidly downloading to Sarah's server.
I sighed in relief, feeling a brief moment of triumph against the family that tried to kill me.
Then my eyes caught a glimpse of the file names transferring across the screen.
They were not financial ledgers or offshore bank accounts.
They were highly detailed medical files, psychological evaluations, and surveillance logs.
Every single file had Sarah's name at the very top.
I turned to look at my dead sister-in-law, realizing the horrible truth too late.
Sarah pulled a small, silver handgun from her waistband and pointed it directly at my chest.
She thanked me for bypassing the security firewall she had spent ten years trying to break.
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She smiled wickedly and admitted that James and Linda were never the masterminds.
They were actually trying to protect me from her.
