Six months later, Seattle thawed into a crisp, bright spring.
I sat by the expansive bay window of my study, sipping black coffee and watching the morning ferries glide across Puget Sound. My home was quiet again. No forced conversations. No hidden agendas. Just the peaceful silence of a life fully owned.
The trial had been remarkably brief. When the FBI raided Elena’s pristine laboratory, they found the exact chemical precursors needed to synthesize her altitude-triggered compound. Her pharmaceutical company, terrified of the PR nightmare, completely disavowed her, handing over years of her encrypted search histories to the federal prosecutors.
Elena’s karma was poetic. A woman who had spent her life manipulating variables, controlling environments, and looking down on everyone from her sterile lab was sentenced to twenty-five years in a federal penitentiary. She now lived in an eight-by-ten concrete cell where her schedule, her meals, and her lights were entirely controlled by someone else. The ultimate loss of autonomy.
Marcus’s fall was even harder.
During the trial, the prosecution unraveled the real reason they needed my five hundred thousand dollars so urgently. Marcus hadn’t just been living a fake, wealthy lifestyle; he had been heavily leveraging funds from aggressive private lenders to invest in a defunct cryptocurrency startup. He was millions in the hole.
When he realized he was going down, my son did what cowards always do: he turned on his wife. He took the stand and sobbed, claiming Elena had brainwashed him, that he was terrified of her. But my cloned hard drive proved otherwise. The emails showed him actively negotiating the timeline of my death. The jury deliberated for less than four hours. Marcus got twenty years for conspiracy to commit murder and elder fraud.
He went to prison completely bankrupt, utterly disgraced, and deeply in debt to men who do not forgive loan defaults—even if you are behind bars. The ledger of his life was entirely in the red.
As for the people who actually deserved a payout, I made sure my books were balanced.
I tracked down Chloe, the flight attendant whose terrifying whisper had saved my life. I didn’t just send her a thank-you note. I set up an anonymous, irrevocable trust in her name, funded with the exact amount of the life insurance policy my son had tried to kill me for—five hundred thousand dollars. I figured she had earned the right to never work a red-eye flight again unless she genuinely wanted to.
I thought my auditing days were finally behind me. I was ready to book a trip—a real one this time, to a warm beach in Maui, far away from altitude drops and snow-capped cabins.
But old habits are hard to kill.
Yesterday afternoon, I was at Harrison’s office to sign the final paperwork formally disinheriting Marcus. Before I left, Harrison slid a manila envelope across the mahogany desk.
“The FBI released the peripheral background files on Elena’s extended family, just to close the loop,” Harrison said, his usually sharp voice sounding strangely hollow. “I thought you should see this.”
I opened the envelope. Inside was a death certificate from five years ago.
It belonged to Elena’s wealthy, reclusive father.
I scanned the medical examiner’s notes, my blood running cold. Cause of death: Sudden, unexplained myocardial infarction. Place of death: A commercial flight from Seattle to Denver. I stared at the paper, the chilling realization washing over me. Marcus hadn’t been a first-time accomplice manipulated by his brilliant wife. They had done this before. They had successfully beta-tested the altitude poison on her father, walked away with his inheritance, squandered it on Marcus’s terrible investments, and then targeted me for their second payday.
And if they had gotten away with it twice, who was their third target supposed to be?
I didn’t pack for Maui. Instead, I pulled out my phone and dialed the lead FBI investigator’s direct line.
“Agent Miller,” I said, looking at the death certificate as the Seattle rain began to tap against my windowpane. “Cancel your weekend plans. The audit isn’t over. We have another body to exhume.”
