I almost laugh, but the sound catches in my throat, too sharp to swallow.My lips might’ve curled into a grin if my face wasn’t so wrecked with pain.
My father is Frankie’s husband.
The cheating, two-pump-chump billionaire Monty Novak is my damn father.
I press my tongue against my teeth, biting down hard enough to taste iron.
Montgomery Strakh.That’s his real name.
My father.
I wouldn’t believe it if the doctor hadn’t played the audio clips of my family discussing it in private.I heard their voices, their validations of our DNA.
It’s too much.Too fucking much.
I want to roar.I want to laugh.I want to tear the truth out of my skin like shrapnel because what the fuck does it even mean?I spent my whole life not knowing who fathered me.How fitting that I learned the truth while being cut open during my own autopsy?
I let out a breathless, shuddering, maniacal laugh, my torso shaking and weeping blood.The pain lances through me, but it’s distant now, nothing compared to the torture of my thoughts.
The doctor told me everything he knew about my family, and I told him nothing.
I won’t be able to keep my silence next time.And therewillbe a next time.Many, many more.
He has terrible plans for my family and me.Delusional, mad-clown, chainsaw-massacre plans.
I don’t know what to do with this information.I don’t know how to save them.
“They escaped,” I whisper.“They survived.”
Now I must do the same.
3500 miles away
The screen shatters in my grip, glass and pixels dying under my fist.I’ve already wiped the drives, but it’s not enough.I have to make sure there’s nothing left.No scraps.No fragments.No breadcrumbs for them to follow.
The laptop hits the floor, a final blow from my boot reducing it to a mangled corpse of circuits and plastic.
Controlled destruction.
Precision in violence.
The walls of my studio apartment close in, the air thick with the scent of sweat and burned hardware.
I should’ve seen this coming.I track everyone.I watch from the shadows, pulling their strings.I’m the ghost in their machines, the virus in their networks, the spider in their dark webs they don’t even know they fear.
Yet somehow, they found me.
A miscalculation.A hairline fracture in my impenetrable firewalls.
I grin, seething.
They think they’re omnipotent, but they have no idea what they’ve done.They stirred the waters and released the Kraken.They should’ve let the sleeping beast lie.
The law thinks it has me in its sights.I see them lurking outside, the unmarked cars and pathetic attempts at surveillance.
They think I don’t know, don’t see them, don’t feel them breathing.
They don’t know me at all.
