Chapter 5 - The Phantom Woman
I stared at the tiny recording device resting in the palm of my hand.
Jessica had not just been manipulating my son; she had been actively spying on my most vulnerable moments.
I grabbed my car keys and ordered Brandon to follow me immediately.
We drove in silence to a cheap motel on the outskirts of the city.
I paid for a room using cash so Marcus and Jessica could not track my credit cards.
Once we were inside the dingy room, I forced Brandon to give me his cell phone.
I smashed the phone beneath the heel of my shoe to destroy its GPS tracker.
Brandon looked at me with wide, terrified eyes, finally realizing the horrifying magnitude of his mistakes.
He confessed that he had given Jessica access to all his passwords because he genuinely believed they were getting married.
I opened my laptop and connected to a secure, encrypted network Arthur had set up for me.
I began running a deep background check on the woman known as Jessica Miller.
The initial search results showed a perfectly clean record and a fabricated work history.
But when I ran her photograph through an advanced facial recognition database, the truth finally emerged.
Her real name was Elena Rostova, and she was an internationally wanted fugitive.
Elena had successfully bankrupted three other wealthy families using the exact same romantic manipulation tactics.
She targeted entitled, naive sons and used them to bleed their parents dry before vanishing without a trace.
I turned the laptop screen toward Brandon, forcing him to look at the mugshots of his beloved fiancée.
He vomited into the motel trash can as his entire reality shattered into a million pieces.
Suddenly, the motel room television turned itself on at maximum volume.
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A live video feed of my dark, empty house in Pacific Heights appeared on the screen.
Flames were rapidly spreading across the velvet curtains in my living room.
