Chapter 2 - The Interrogation
The interrogation room was a sterile, freezing box that smelled of stale coffee and industrial bleach. For three hours, Detective Reynolds paced in front of the metal table, relentlessly trying to break me down.
"Aggravated assault. Assault with a deadly weapon. You permanently disfigured your husband, Mrs. Harrington. His mother says it was completely unprovoked. She says you've been unstable for weeks."
"I was defending myself," I rasped, my throat dry. "He struck me first. His family set me up."
Reynolds let out a harsh bark of laughter. "A slap warrants third-degree burns? The DA is going to have a field day with you. The Harringtons are the most powerful family in this county. They have the mayor on speed dial. You are going away for a very long time."
I leaned forward, the metal cuffs biting into my wrists. "There is a camera. In the dining room. Top shelf of the mahogany hutch. It recorded everything. It recorded Brooklyn pushing me, and it recorded Callan hitting me."
Reynolds paused, narrowing his eyes. He stepped out of the room. When he returned twenty minutes later, his expression was completely devoid of sympathy.
"My officers swept the house. There is a camera, yes. But the local drive was completely wiped. Corrupted. There is no footage, Anastasia. Just the word of three upstanding citizens against a woman who threw boiling oil on her husband."
My blood ran cold. Melissa. She was ruthless, but she was fast. She must have realized the camera was there and had one of her security guards wipe the hard drive before the police even thought to look. They were going to bury me.
That night, I was transferred to holding. I sat on the hard concrete bench, staring at the peeling gray paint, the reality of my situation crushing my chest. I was entirely alone. My parents, bless their hearts, were mortgaging their small hardware store just to afford my bail. The Harringtons were going to spin a narrative that would paint me as a psychopathic gold-digger who snapped.
But as I sat in the dark, staring at the ceiling, a memory flashed in my mind.
Six months ago. The house was empty. Melissa had asked me to set up a new "smart home" network for her because she was terrible with technology. I had connected the lights, the thermostat, and the security cameras. But the dining room camera—a cheap model Brooklyn had bought on a whim to watch her teacup poodle—wouldn't sync to the Harringtons' main security server.
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To test it, I had synced it to my own personal cloud storage account. I had never logged out.
If my theory was right, the local drive was wiped, but the footage wasn't gone. It was sitting on a server, waiting for me. I just had to get out of this cell.
