Chapter 4 - THE DESCENT OF THE PARASITES
Detective Reeves didn’t hesitate for a single second.
She raised her hand, signaling three additional officers who fanned out instantly behind her, their heavy boots stepping onto the hardwood floor of the master suite.
Daniel tried to backpedal into the walk-in closet, his face pale and slick with cold sweat, but an officer grabbed him firmly by the shoulder and spun him around with practiced efficiency.
“Daniel Mercer?” the officer demanded, pulling a pair of cold steel handcuffs from his belt.
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”
“No! Get your hands off me!” Daniel bellowed, thrashing wildly against the grip of the officers as the metal cuffs clicked shut around his wrists with a sharp, terrifying sound.
“This is a mistake! My wife is framing me! She’s mentally unstable! Call my lawyer!”
Margaret scrambled across the carpet on her hands and knees, reaching out frantically to grab the hem of the police officer’s trousers as they hauled her son toward the hallway.
“Leave my son alone!” Margaret shrieked, tears and mascara streaming down her wrinkled face in a disgusting display of hysterical grief.
“He’s a good boy! He’s a provider! Take her instead! Arrest her!”
Detective Reeves looked down at Margaret with an expression of profound, clinical disgust, stepping past her as if she were nothing more than a stray piece of trash on the pavement.
“Ma’am, I’d suggest you step back unless you want to join your son in the back of the paddy wagon for obstruction of justice and accessory to financial fraud,” Detective Reeves warned coldly.
Margaret froze, her hands falling limp to her sides as the reality of her own precarious legal situation finally began to penetrate her delusional mind.
She looked around the bedroom—the room she had treated like her personal kingdom for eleven months—and realized that her reign of parasitic entitlement had finally come to a brutal, unceremonious end.
The officers dragged Daniel past me toward the stairs, his head hanging low in absolute defeat, his expensive silk pajamas wrinkled and stained with his own panicked sweat.
As he reached the landing, he lifted his eyes for a fraction of a second to look at me, his expression twisted into a mixture of pure hatred and bottomless despair.
“You’ll pay for this, Elena,” Daniel hissed venomously through his teeth.
“You won’t get a dime of my tech firm’s future profits! You’ll be ruined!”
“What tech firm, Daniel?” I asked smoothly, stepping to the edge of the railing to watch him descend the stairs between two armed officers.
“The board of directors accepted my emergency debt-restructuring buyout yesterday afternoon.”
“Your company was liquidated at midnight.”
“You don't own a tech firm anymore.”
“You own a federal indictment.”
Daniel let out a hoarse, desperate cry of pure rage, but the officers silenced him quickly, shoving him down the remaining steps toward the waiting squad cars parked outside in the grey morning light.
Margaret slumped forward onto the bedroom carpet, burying her face in her hands and sobbing hysterically into the wool fibers as the heavy front door slammed shut downstairs, sealing her son’s fate.
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I stood alone in the hallway for a long, quiet moment, listening to the sirens begin to wail in the driveway as the police vehicles prepared to transport Daniel to the downtown precinct.
The air in the house felt lighter already—as if a toxic, suffocating fog had finally been blown away by a violent, cleansing storm.
