Chapter 5 - The Trap is Sprayed
5
At 5:00 PM, the sun began to dip below the horizon, casting long, amber shadows across the manicured lawns of Rosewood Manor. The three hundred guests had long since departed, fleeing the estate in their luxury sedans and town cars like rats abandoning a sinking ship.
In the holding salon, Julian Pearce was sweating profusely through his custom-tailored tuxedo. His hands, still zip-tied behind his back, ached from the tension. Across the room, Genevieve sat staring blankly at the wall, her bridal veil discarded on the floor like trash.
The heavy mahogany door clicked open.
Alex walked into the room alone. He wasn't carrying a weapon, nor was he shouting. He simply pulled up a mahogany chair, sat down opposite Julian, and crossed his legs, resting his elbows on his knees.
Julian swallowed hard, forcing a desperate, pathetic smile onto his face. "Alex... buddy. Look, I know how this looks. It was Genevieve’s idea! She manipulated me! She said you didn't appreciate me, that I deserved a cut of the tech stack since I wrote half the code back in Dayton—"
"Shut up, Julian," Alex said mildly.
Julian snapped his mouth shut, the color draining entirely from his cheeks.
"You wrote thirty percent of the initial codebase fifteen years ago," Alex said calmly. "And for fifteen years, I paid you an annual base salary of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, granted you five million stock options, and made you a multi-millionaire ten times over. But greed isn't about math, Julian. Greed is a disease of the soul."
Genevieve turned her head slowly, her eyes narrowing with venom. "You think you're so smart, Alex, don't you? Sitting up here on your billionaire throne, judging everyone around you. You never loved me! You treated me like another asset to be acquired and displayed on your arm at charity galas!"
"You're right, Genevieve," Alex replied without missing a beat. "I didn't love you. Because if I had truly loved you, I would have bothered to look past the porcelain skin and the designer dresses to see the venom underneath. That’s my fault. I accept full responsibility for my own blindness."
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small pocketknife, and sliced through the zip-ties binding Julian’s wrists, then did the same for Genevieve.
Both of them rubbed their raw, red wrists in stunned silence, looking up at him with cautious, disbelieving eyes.
"What... what are you doing?" Julian asked, his voice trembling. "Are you letting us go?"
"I am giving you an opportunity," Alex said smoothly, standing up and walking toward the door. "At 8:00 PM tonight, Richard Sterling’s private jet is scheduled to depart from Teterboro Airport for Zurich. I know about the contingency plan. I know about the offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. And I know that Sterling is holding the master private keys to the digital wallets where you've stashed the four hundred million dollars."
Julian and Genevieve exchanged a frantic, disbelieving look.
"If you walk out the front gates right now," Alex continued, pausing at the threshold, "you will find a town car waiting for you. It will take you straight to Teterboro. If you get on that plane with Sterling, you can fly to Switzerland and live like kings on stolen money."
Genevieve stood up slowly, her eyes narrowing with suspicion. "What's the catch, Alex? Why would you just let us walk away with four hundred million dollars?"
Alex turned his head slightly, a cold, predatory smile touching his lips. ရှင်
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"Because, Genevieve," Alex said softly, "the moment that plane enters international airspace, those digital wallets won't contain four hundred million dollars of my money. They will contain four hundred million dollars of counterfeit cryptocurrency flagged by federal Interpol tracking protocols. By sunrise tomorrow, the Swiss authorities won't be welcoming you to a private bank. They’ll be extraditing you to a maximum-security black site."
With that, Alex walked out of the room, closing the heavy oak door behind him with a soft, final click.
