Chapter 2 - The Digital Ghost
By midnight, Marcus was sitting at our kitchen island, his laptop glowing in the dark room like an altar to vengeance. Piles of takeout containers and empty coffee cups littered the counter, but neither of us cared about food or sleep.
"You were right to call me, Claire," Marcus murmured, his fingers flying across the mechanical keyboard with rhythmic precision. "Ryan thinks he wiped his phone clean before he came to your parents' house, but people always leave breadcrumbs. They think deleting a text message makes it vanish into thin air. It doesn't. It just moves to a different server."
I sat across from him, wrapped in a heavy wool blanket, staring out the dark window at the quiet suburban street. "What did you find?"
Marcus stopped typing. The silence stretched for a terrifying moment before he turned the laptop screen toward me.
On the display was a series of extracted chat logs between a burner account and Natalie Pierce’s verified phone number, dating back to three weeks before our house burned down.
User: Phoenix_77 (Ryan's alternate encrypted handle) Phoenix_77: If the insurance adjuster looks at the wiring in the study, will it hold up? Natalie: It’s an old house, babe. Old houses catch fire all the time. Just make sure you’re out before midnight, or I’m calling off our trip to Cabo. Phoenix_77: I'll stage the scene. Pour the accelerant near the baseboard by the old bookshelf. It’ll look like a short circuit from the space heater.
My breath hitched. My chest tightened so violently I thought I was having a heart attack.
An accelerant. He didn't just let the house catch fire; he engineered it. He poured a chemical accelerant near the bookshelf in our study. And why? For insurance money? To run away with Natalie? Or was it something darker—did he think that in the chaos of a midnight blaze, I wouldn't make it out at all?
"The policy," I choked out, the realization dawning like a sunrise over a wasteland. "We increased our homeowner’s and life insurance policy by two million dollars six months ago. Ryan insisted. He said with the housing market volatile, we needed to protect our assets."
"And who was the sole beneficiary of your personal life insurance policy?" Marcus asked softly, though he already knew the answer.
"Me," I whispered. "And I was his."
Except, if I died in the fire, Ryan would walk away with a multi-million-dollar payout, free to start a new life with Natalie, while everyone pitied the poor widower whose wife tragically perished trying to save him.
My heroism—the very thing that left my face permanently scarred, my skin grafted from my thigh, my body broken—had ruined his master plan. By dragging him out of that burning room, I had survived to become the one thing standing between him and his freedom.
"He didn't just want a divorce, Marcus," I said, my voice dropping an octave into a cold, flat register that terrified even myself. "He wanted me dead. And when I survived, he had to pretend to love me while he figured out his next move."
Marcus closed the laptop lid with a soft snap. "We take this to the police first thing in the morning. Arson, attempted murder, insurance fraud. He’ll spend the rest of his life behind bars."
"No," I said, shaking my head slowly as a dark, calculated warmth spread through my veins. "The police rely on circumstantial evidence and slow bureaucracy. Ryan is smart, and he has corporate lawyers who can stall for months. I don't want a trial that drags on for years, Marcus."
"Then what do you want?"
May you like
I looked at my reflection in the dark glass of the window—the faint outline of tight, shiny skin, the missing eyebrow, the stark reminder of what he had stolen from me.
"I want him to confess," I said. "With his own mouth. On his own terms. And I know exactly how to set the stage."
