Before he left the bedroom, Daniel bent over the bed, kissed my forehead, and whispered, “Poor Audrey. You never saw this coming.”
I waited until I heard the heavy front door click shut. Then, I opened my eyes. Daniel had no idea just how wrong he was. I had been waiting three weeks for this exact night.
It had started several hours earlier when he came upstairs carrying a cup of tea. “You look exhausted,” he said softly. “Drink this and get some rest.”
That alone made me instantly suspicious. Daniel never prepared tea; honestly, I wasn’t even convinced he knew where the teabags were kept. Taking the tiniest sip, I detected a slight, unfamiliar bitterness. That by itself wasn’t proof, but after months of unusual wire transfers, suspicious business trips, and phone calls that abruptly stopped whenever I entered the room, I had learned not to ignore anomalies.
So I smiled, waited until Daniel went downstairs, poured the tea into the bathroom sink, and got back into bed to play possum.
Roughly forty minutes later, his footsteps returned. Through barely opened eyes, I watched him slide open the safe in our walk-in closet. A soft electronic beep followed as he pulled out two passports, bundles of cash, velvet jewelry cases, and a blue folder bearing the logo of Sterling Global—the corporate empire my mother had spent thirty-one years building before leaving me controlling ownership.
