Chapter 7 - The Interrogation
The second intruder froze mid-swing, the heavy metal flashlight slipping from his trembling fingers and clattering loudly against the floorboards. Beneath Ethan, the scarred man stopped thrashing, pinned securely by Ethan’s knee pressed firmly into his spine and the heavy wooden maul resting near his throat.
"Don't move an inch," Ethan panted, wiping a streak of blood from his cheek where a stray shard of window glass had clipped him. He looked up at his father, a mix of awe and deep remorse washing over him. "Dad... I am so sorry. I was an idiot. I let her lie to me."
Richard lowered the hammer of the revolver just a fraction, keeping the barrel aimed squarely at the center mass of the intruders. His aged eyes softened slightly as he looked down at his son, but his voice remained steely. "We can talk about your mistakes later, Ethan. Right now, we have more pressing matters. These gentlemen seem to have mistaken our cabin for a public registry office."
"Who sent you?" Ethan demanded, pressing his knee harder into the scarred man's back until the intruder let out a sharp gasp of pain. "Who has my wife and son?"
"Go to hell," the scarred man spat, his face pressed against the dusty floorboards.
Richard walked forward slowly, his boots clicking softly on the wood. He didn't yell. He didn't threaten them with crude insults. Instead, he simply knelt down beside the pinned man, placing the cold barrel of the revolver right against the man's temple.
"At my age, son, you learn that people who break into cabins in the middle of the night aren't martyrs," Richard said calmly. "They're contractors. And contractors talk when the payment bounces. Now, who's paying you? Is it the firm downtown, or did someone else hire you to clean up loose ends?"
The scarred man’s bravado completely evaporated. The cold steel against his skin was a chilling reminder that an old man with nothing left to lose was far more dangerous than a young man full of rage.
"Wait! Don't shoot! It wasn't us!" the second intruder blurted out, raising his hands in frantic surrender. "We were just hired muscle! We don't have his wife!"
Ethan frowned, his grip loosening slightly in surprise. "What do you mean you don't have them? I got a text from your boss saying you have Sophia and my boy!"
"That wasn't our boss!" the man stammered, his eyes darting toward the revolver. "That was the woman! Your wife! She set up the whole thing with a shell company downtown months ago! She wasn't kidnapped—she staged the whole abduction so you'd panic, sign over the estate deeds, and let her clean out the remaining trust accounts before the audit hit!"
The room went dead silent. The crackling of the fireplace seemed to fade into the background, replaced by the ringing roar in Ethan’s ears.
Sophia.
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Even after being exposed framing an old man on security cameras, she hadn't fled to her mother's house. She had used the crisis as a smokescreen to execute the final phase of her grand theft scheme, manipulating Ethan’s guilt to make him willingly hand over everything his family had built.
"She's playing us," Ethan whispered, a cold sickness washing over him. "She's playing us all."
