“Richard, stop!” he hissed. “If you destroy this, you destroy your only leverage! If you go home screaming right now, she’ll call the police. She’ll tell the doctors the poison is making you hallucinate. They will lock you in a ward, and she will win.”
He was right. The cold, logical part of my brain—the part that had built a real estate empire from nothing—snapped back into focus.
I took a shaky breath, straightening my jacket. “Can you put this on an encrypted drive?”
“Already done,” Tony said, slipping a black flash drive into my palm.
I walked out of the basement and sat in my car for a long time. I called my attorney, Ms. Sterling—no relation, just the most ruthless litigator I knew.
“Open a new, highly classified file,” I instructed, staring blankly at the brick wall of the alley. “Freeze everything offshore. Prepare to lock the properties and suspend all trust access. And find me a private toxicologist. I need a discreet test for digoxin.”
“Understood, Richard,” she replied without missing a beat. “What’s our timeline?”
“Short,” I rasped. “I have to go home and drink poison.”
The true horror of my situation did not hit me in the restaurant basement. It hit me that night, lying in the dark, listening to the rhythmic breathing of the woman sleeping beside me.
The scent of her lavender night cream, a smell that had once meant comfort and home, now turned my stomach. I lay rigid, staring at the ceiling, acutely aware of how close her hand was to my neck. I was sharing a bed with an executioner who kissed me goodnight.
The next seven days became a psychological thriller set within the walls of my own estate. Every interaction was a tightrope walk over a gaping abyss. I had to play the part of the fading patriarch perfectly.
The mornings were the hardest.
“Here you go, my love,” Eleanor would coo, setting the thick, green ginger smoothie on the mahogany desk in my home office. “Drink it all. You need your strength.”
“Thank you, El,” I would smile, forcing my hand not to shake as I took the cold glass.
I would wait until I heard her heels click down the hallway. The liquid tasted sharply bitter beneath the burn of the ginger—a chemical taint I had blindly ignored for weeks. I couldn’t just pour it down the sink; she checked the pipes, the trash, everything. She was meticulous.
Instead, I turned to the massive, potted Meyer lemon tree sitting in the corner of my study—a gift she had given me for our anniversary. Every morning, I quietly poured the lethal green sludge into the soil, burying it under the decorative moss. Then, I would wipe the rim of the glass and leave a tiny sip at the bottom, just enough to look authentic.
By the fourth day, the leaves on the lemon tree began to curl. By the sixth day, they were turning a sickly, necrotic yellow. The poison was so potent it was killing a six-foot plant.
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