FAZER LOGINFRIEDA’S POV
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, my husband proved to me he had just started playing his cruel game, and he wasn’t stopping anytime soon.
The smirk on both their faces struck me like an arrow—like a planned out script for a new movie titled “Terrorizing Frieda Enriquez.”
I haven’t seen my sister in ten years.
TEN WHOLE YEARS since I managed to escape her haunting, creeping shadow and become my own person.
“Everyone, I introduce you to Serena. She will be living with us now, and making sure the house stays in order while I get better. So I want everyone to welcome and treat her well,” he said. His voice, bold and commanding.
“Oh, Mikeyyy!” She rushed forward and pecked him on the cheek. I remained frozen, as if in trance, half-expecting to wake from the nightmare that was in front of me.
“Thanks for inviting me. Oh, dear, you poor thing! I hopped in the jet and came in as soon as you called. I’m so sorry. Everything is going to be fine.”
“Nice to meet you all. I’m so much fun. Oooo…I’m excited!” She cackled.
The way she rushed, threw herself at him and rubbed his shoulders and the way he welcomed her, smiling, knowing fully well who she was made me sick to my stomach.
So all this while my husband was this close to my sister and I didn’t know?
He was close to something so sour and poisonous, that I had cut off years ago. Who knows what nonsense she’s filled his head with to instigate more toxic behavior from him.
Although the room seems to like her energy at first, it shifts to an awkward vibe. The devil can’t hide behind a mask for long.
“Wow! The house is gorgeous! It took a while for me to get here cause my driver got lost at the damn entrance!
“You should’ve told me you had a whole city here. Gosh! I would’ve come in with a chopper or something.” She rolled her eyes playfully and chuckled.
“My bad. I forgot how much of a drama queen you are. Don’t worry, next time I’ll deliver a custom-made chopper with your name on it, and a red carpet reading, ‘Welcome Queen Serena’.” He responded. I raised an eyebrow.
Who is this? Cause it’s definitely not the strict husband I married that always takes everything seriously and has no sense of humor.
“HAHAAHA! MIKEYYY!” She cackled—forced, irritating and intentional.
Everything about her is fake and has an ulterior motive. I just don’t know what it is yet.
“Should teach a course to the boys on how to treat a woman so bad she can’t stay away.” Her smirk deepened as she bit her lip, her eyes locked on him in a way meant to humiliate me.
He twirled her around from his chair. He gave her a sexy gaze, dangerous, hungry and wanting. He kept entertaining her nonsense, not just in front of me but in front of everyone.
The energy in the room got really weird. He wanted everyone to see us as the perfect couple, but here he was, openly flirting with my sister who got surgery to look like me.
The irony. Geez.
His plan to terrorize me started working cause I began boiling with rage.
The way he admired her you would think they’ve been married for a long time. And what pissed me off more, was not even the fact that he had a mistress, it’s the fact that it was my evil sister and they weren’t even trying to hide it.
Like I meant nothing. Had no feelings of my own. Just a pawn in their sick little game.
“Get out of here, you sick, insane, harlot!” I snapped before I could stop myself.
As I stood up for myself, I felt good. Like very fucking good. The atmosphere in the room turned cold and silent.
I glared at the witch herself, my eyes burning with rage, my heartbeat pumping fast. She finally caught up to my presence, scanning me with the sly focus of a fox with a nasty grimace. Her eyes struck me cold: a mix of disdain, anger and envy.
Michael sat there, fierce. He loved that he could flip my switch. He looked like a dangerous puppet master that just finished the starters and was hungry for the main course.
Even though I felt great in the moment, I couldn’t help but feel my anxiety rise. My hands started shaking and got sweaty.
“Everyone, leave us. I would like to have a chat with my wife and Serena.” The puppet master broke his silence, commanding his army.
“Frey, darling, I haven’t even been here for a sec and you’re already having an outburst. Girl, take a chill pill. I’m here for vacation. I didn’t come here to fight you, sweetheart, not when you look unwell.” The witch spoke, her mouth rushed like a tap, void of any empathy.
I gave her a vicious glare, my eyeballs darting over her like a predator sizing up its prey, then turned to my captor: “What are you doing? Why is she here? She can’t be here. This is completely absurd!”
Tension in the room grew fast and I exploded: “I hate you! You treacherous, bitch! Get out of my life!”
I took off my shoe and threw it at her, but she dodged. “Frieda! How dare you?!” She burst into flames and came at me like a wild lion.
Michael was blown away. His eyes shot open, not just in shock, but amusement at the chaos unfolding.
His parents should have named him manipulation.
“You identity thieving psycho! Leave me alone! Why can’t you let me be?! You will never ever be me! Get out of my matrimonial home!” I continued firing.
“You lowlife, good for nothing brat. Don’t let any of these deceive you!” Her hands swept across the room, emphasizing every lavish detail.
“You are a nobody! And the only reason you have any value at all is because of Michael over here!” She sneered.
“So don’t you dare disrespect the finger that feeds you, you ungrateful moron!” She slapped me across the face. The sharp sting flared against my cheek, and before I could think, I pulled her hair. She shoved me hard, and I fell to the floor.
“You are not on my level, Frieda! You will never come close to my league!”
“Mikeyy do something, she’s insane!” She spun around and planted herself behind him, pulling out her phone to record me.
“Touch me again and you’re going to the rehabilitation center. Clearly, you’ve lost it. Mikeyy, are you really going to let her assault me in your house?”
“That’s enough, Frieda! This is our matrimonial home, yes. But I am the one in charge. You will obey me and submit to my authority. Your sister will be living here, and you will not attack her again. This is final.” Michael broke his silence, his words a declaration that my peace had been shattered.
I broke down on the floor in tears. My mind raced a thousand miles a second. The room tilted. Everything blurred.
The last thing I saw was that bitter smirk planted on the witch's lips, beside her new partner in crime, seated like a king, comfortable as they feasted on my destruction.
That was it. My eyes shut.
SARAH'S POV"Come on, sleep."The ceiling didn't cooperate. Neither did the pillow, the blanket, the dark, the quiet. I had been lying in the same position for forty minutes watching the room stay exactly as it was while my brain refused to slow down.I pushed the covers back, swung my legs over the edge, and stood.The safe house at two in the morning was the particular quiet of a place holding its breath. I moved downstairs without turning on the lights, found the kitchen by memory, filled a glass, drank half of it standing at the sink looking at the dark window above it.On my way back up, the light stopped me.Tom's door was open two inches, a thin line of yellow cutting across the hallway floor. I pushed it gently, expecting to find him awake, hunched over a screen, running another trace on Clara's location.He was asleep at his desk, cheek against his forearm, breathing slow. The lamp was still on. Papers covered every surface around him, maps, photographs, printed network recor
ELIZABETH'S POV"Michael knows what happened that night."The voice on the phone delivered it clean, no preamble, no cushioning, one sentence dropped into the silence of a moving car like something thrown through glass.My hands jerked on the wheel. The car drifted half a lane before I corrected it, heart slamming, the safe house disappearing in the rearview mirror behind me. I had pulled away cleanly, or thought I had. The two figures on the step had moved toward the street. I had not waited to see if they reached the car.Now none of that mattered.If Michael knew what happened that night, then everything Garrett had spent years burying was no longer buried. It was sitting somewhere in Michael Van Leer's files, in his calculation, in the private architecture of whatever he was building with Rael's infrastructure.Garrett's darkest secret was no longer his.Which meant sooner or later, it would reach Sarah.I pulled the car to the side of the road, then I cut the engine, and sat with
SARAH'S POVThe common area had become exactly what safe houses were never supposed to become, a room where people sat in the same space while trusting each other less with every passing minute. Viktor at the table, running diagnostics that kept returning the same clean result. Tom beside him, reading through Clara's file for the fourth time. Alvin near the window. Michael standing at the far wall looking at his phone, then putting it down, then picking it up again.Garrett was the only one not in the room. He had been gone for ten minutes. Nobody had acknowledged it.I pushed my chair back, stood, moved toward the stairs without explaining myself. Nobody asked where I was going. That was the thing about a room where trust had cracked, everyone gave everyone else a wide berth, because narrowing the distance required conversation, conversation required honesty, honesty required things nobody was ready to spend.I sat on the top step of the landing, back against the wall, knees up, loo
MICHAEL'S POV"Nobody touches anything."The room froze. Every screen still displaying the same warning line, the locks still cycling through their sealed positions, the backup systems humming at a frequency the safe house had never used before. Viktor's hands hovered above the keyboard, not touching, waiting.I moved to the central terminal.Sarah watched me cross the room. I felt her watching. Not with fear, with the particular attention she deployed when she was cataloguing information about a person rather than listening to what they were saying.I pulled up the breach architecture. The intrusion signature was clean, too clean, the kind of clean that came from someone who knew exactly what they were looking for, exactly where to find it, exactly how to move through a system without triggering the primary alerts. They had used the primary alerts themselves as the announcement.Tom came up beside me. "Is this Claudia?""If Claudia found us, the system wouldn't be displaying a warnin
SARAH'S POVMichael looked at me across the safe house main room, the space between us carrying every person who had watched Alvin deliver that sentence thirty seconds ago. Viktor near the door. Tom at the table. Garrett by the wall. Alvin standing exactly where he had planted himself, watching Michael with the particular patience of someone who had already decided what they thought."Explain it," I pressed. "Tell me what survival logic looks like when you threaten my life.""I was testing Rael," Michael replied, level, unhurried. "If I reacted emotionally, I confirmed that my connection to you was a liability he could use against me." He held my gaze. "If I stayed calm, I stayed inside the information flow. I kept access to everything he was about to tell me.""So my safety is a calculation? Oh, wow!""Everyone's safety is a calculation in this situation," he replied. "That is not a preference. That is the reality of what we are inside.""And who made you the person who gets to calcul
DAVINA'S POV"Are you certain you want to start a war with Michael Van Leer?"The question landed across the table with the weight of someone who had seen wars started and understood what they cost before the first move was made. My contact sat with both hands flat on the surface, watching my face, giving me the full space of the silence to reconsider.I had been in this room for twenty minutes. The location was unremarkable, a back office above a laundry on a street that smelled like detergent, water damage, the particular ordinariness of a place nobody looked at twice. I had chosen it for exactly that reason.The copied notebook entries were in the folder between us. Weeks of work, organized by date, cross-referenced by name, built into a timeline that connected Michael's calls, his instructions, his plans, his voice in a hospital room where he thought I was empty.I looked at the folder. Then at the person across from me."My mother spent her life paying for Marcus Van Leer's sins,
FRIEDA’S POV“We’re approaching the coordinates now."Commander Hayes's voice passed through the helicopter headset. I pressed my face against the window, watching the landscape change from gray ocean to green countryside.My hands shook as I gripped Patricia's files. I'd been reading them for the e
GARRETT’S POV Even though I felt crazy terrified inside, I couldn’t slip up because he was already suspicious. So I remained composed and maintained eye contact as he taunted me with his venomous gaze.“Well then. Do your job, and I’ll get to mine,” he said coldly, slamming the door in my face.The
GARRETT’S POV Her eyes screamed for help. Too innocent for a world like this. I wanted to stay. Pull her aside, hold her hands, and whisper the truth. Tell her everything would be fine.But that was a lie.Sometimes the truth doesn’t set you free. It chains you, tighter and tighter, until freedom
FRIEDA’S POV I opened my eyes, my head spinning. The EKG monitor beeped steadily as I looked at my left hand and saw my veins connected to a drip. I rubbed my eyes with my right hand and yawned. Turning to my right, I saw a doctor sitting with her back to me, typing on a computer.“Doc what happe







