Chapter 9 - Three Years Later

|

The bell above the bakery door chimed, bringing a rush of salty ocean air into the warm shop.

"Mommy, look!"

I looked down at the blonde, blue-eyed boy tugging at my apron. Leo was three years old, a whirlwind of energy and laughter. He held up a perfectly deformed gingerbread man.

"It's beautiful, Leo," I smiled, wiping a smudge of flour from his nose.

My name was Elena now. I owned a small, quiet bakery in a coastal town three hundred miles from the city that almost became my grave. The clinic doctor who saved us that night had falsified the birth records and helped me vanish into thin air.

"Elena, table four needs a wipe down," my teenage cashier called out.

"On it," I replied, grabbing a rag.

I kept my head down, my life strictly routine. No social media. No credit cards. No photos. Just me, the flour, and my son.

But every time Leo smiled, my heart broke just a fraction. He had Adrien's jawline. He had his father's startlingly intense, storm-gray eyes. Raising him was a daily reminder of the man who had left us to die.

I walked to the back office, locking the door behind me. I opened the bottom drawer of my desk and pulled out a small, heavy lockbox. Inside sat a single, encrypted USB drive.

Before I fled the estate, the mansion's internal system had automatically backed up the nursery footage to my private cloud server. I had spent three years paying a black-market hacker in cryptocurrency to brute-force the password without alerting the Thorne syndicate.

Today, my phone had buzzed with a single word.

May you like

She Gave His Mistress Her Wedding Ring Without Crying—Then the Billionai...

He tied me upside down from the ceiling beam and beat my swollen belly f...

He Came Home After Twelve Christmases—Then Found His Elderly Parents Loc...

Unlocked.

I plugged the drive into my offline laptop. My hands shook as the file finally opened. There they were. Simone and Victor, plotting my murder in high definition. The truth, perfectly preserved in digital amber.