The Return to Betrayal
Part 1: The Locked Door
My key slid into the lock, a familiar ritual after a fifteen-hour flight from Singapore, but it didn’t turn. It hit a wall of resistance like metal meeting metal, the mechanism completely dead. I jiggled it gently at first, thinking perhaps the lock had been affected by the unseasonable humidity that had settled over Manhattan like a wet blanket, but deep down, the cold steel in my hand told me a different truth.
This wasn’t weather. This wasn’t a malfunction. This was deliberate.
Through the glass panels flanking my front door—custom Italian glass I’d selected myself, frosted with a geometric pattern that cost more than most people’s monthly rent—I saw movement. A silhouette. A stranger was sitting on my custom leather sofa, the one I’d had shipped from a boutique workshop in Florence.
His feet were propped up casually on the coffee table, a piece of reclaimed teak I’d found at an estate sale in Connecticut. And in his hand, catching the afternoon light filtering through my floor-to-ceiling windows, was a crystal tumbler filled with amber liquid that I recognized immediately: my Glenfiddich 30-year-old scotch, a bottle I’d been saving for a promotion that had come through three weeks ago. Panic didn’t set in.
That would come later, in the quiet moments when my body finally understood what my mind was already processing. What hit me first was rage—pure, white-hot, clarifying rage that burned through the jet lag and the confusion and the exhaustion from two weeks of intensive auditing work in Southeast Asia. I pounded on the door with the flat of my palm, the glass rattling in its frame, the sound echoing off the marble hallway of the luxury building I’d worked eighty-hour weeks to afford.
The door swung open, but it wasn’t the stranger who answered. It wasn’t building security coming to investigate the disturbance. It was my brother, Brandon.
He was wearing my silk robe—the deep emerald one I had bought in Kyoto during a consulting trip two years ago, the one with hand-embroidered cherry blossoms along the lapels—and he didn’t look surprised to see me. He didn’t look guilty or embarrassed or caught. He looked bored.
He looked like a man who had been interrupted during a commercial break of a show he wasn’t particularly interested in anyway. “You’re trespassing,” he said flatly, his body blocking the entrance to my own home, one shoulder leaning against the doorframe with studied casualness. “I sold this place last week.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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