CHAPTER 3

Ryan HeelRiven looked at Fina until she went out of sight.

 Inside of his massive office, he had an outlook of the city that most would kill for. But as he looked down at his phone, he could see that not all in his world was right.

It was a message from a private investigator. His girlfriend, Elaine, was talking with another man in a café. Successive images sent to him show them holding hands, embracing, and going back to her apartment.

The very apartment that a low-level employee from the mailroom was located.

Ryan’s hands gripped his phone tightly as he thought about all the things he was going to do. He phoned his assistant immediately. “Arnold.”

Arnold, his assistant, came into the room within three minutes. “You called, sir?”

“Bring that employee to me,” Ryan said. “And every coworker who works with her. I don’t care how you do it.”

Arnold nodded. He thought gravely about the last time he did such a thing. If it weren’t for Arnold’s intervention, it would probably lead to legal trouble. But it wasn’t anything Ryan couldn’t buy himself out of. It was merely a headache for Arnold, and all the trouble he might be getting into.

Nevertheless, he made arrangements as Ryan requested.

Fina walked into the restaurant immediately after work. She saw her fiancé sitting at the table nearest to the window.

She sat down across from him. He looked down, and seemed to be grave.

“Did someone die?” Fina said.

He didn’t meet her eyes, and shook his head. “No, thank god.”

“Then what’s wrong?” she said.

“I’m seeing someone else,” he said in one breath. He took another breath and looked at her right in the eyes. “I want to break up.”

Fina was perplexed, but tried her best to think of the last tv show she thought of with this exact scenario. How did the actors react to similar news?

Void. Again. It was like someone locked her memories behind a door. She wished her thoughts didn’t have an expiration date like they usually did. So instead, she managed a sad expression and a simple frown.

“I see,” she said.

David paused. He looked at her funny. “Aren’t you angry?”

Fina nodded and lied. “Very. That was a very mean thing to do.” 

“I’m selling the apartment,” he said. “So I want you to take your things out of the apartment within the next few days.”

Fina blinked. “But it’s my apartment.”

“Why are you making this so difficult?” he said, looking away from her. He sounded a little high strung. “My parents bought me that apartment.”

She was able to remember his parents, though briefly. “Oh, yes, that’s true. They paid for initial down payment and the first two months. But after that, you lost your job, so I took over the rent payments until you could get back on your feet.”

“Then I’ll just take over the payments,” he said. “And I’ll pay for the money you spent on our living costs.”

Fina shrugged. That was fair enough.

“Ok,” Fina said. “I just need moving costs then.”

 He nodded, looking grim again. Fina looked down at her watch. It was almost time to get her dinner started if she wanted to go to bed early.

She got up to leave when her fiancé stopped her.

“I know I’m a bad person,” he said. “But she saved my life.”

Fina wondered if she was going to get any information about this. Oh! Like a well received package, the memory was put in her head.

When David was a child, he tried to run away from home after a fight with his parents and ended up lost. He was saved by a girl who found him and brought him food. Ever since then, he’s been looking for her, but thought she had already died.

Fina had watched at least three other programs last night with this exact same scenario. At first it disturbed her how accurate they were to her own life, right down to the characters personality traits.

The bubbly main character, the possessive yet distant ex, the woman who stole him and would leave him high and dry at the end. But then it dawned on her with frightening clarity.  

She was that missing girl. She was the lost love he had been searching for. However, like the protagonist on the dramas she watched last night it was far too late. Part of her felt helpless because she knew he wouldn’t listen. But a part of her was also relieved, because he would at least learn from his mistakes.

It was best to play along and pretend she didn’t know. She didn’t want to mess with the universe’s plans again.

“She’s alive?” Fina said, trying to sound convincing. “Is it really her?”

“Yes?” he said. He couldn’t tell where she was going with this. He had expected her to cry, or scream at him. But she looked like she was daydreaming. Her eyes were unfocused. She stared at him, but she wasn’t looking at him.

“That’s good,” Fina said. “If you come home tonight, I’ll sleep on the couch.”  

And then she left. But she didn’t make it home.

***

“So, it’s finished?” she said. “Did you kick her out, yet?” Elaine said. She huffed when David entered the car, looking as drab as usual. For some reason, he seemed so guilt ridden.

“Don’t say it like that,” he said. “I never loved her anyway, it’s just something our parents put together.”

“That’s true,” Elaine said. She smiled at him. “Let’s go home.”

And they drove back to Elaine’s apartment.

***

Fina wasn’t the type who got scared easily. So when a pair of men grabbed her and threw her into a car with blacked out windows, she knew she would either die, or be kidnapped.

She didn’t say anything when they brought her to a remote house and forced her to wear a blindfold. They strapped her to a chair and undid the blindfold when they were sure she hadn’t seen anything on the way there.

In front of her was Ryan HeelRiven. He glared at her fiercely. Next to her were her two coworkers, Dee and Mia. Along with six other coworkers from the mail department and lower ranks of the company.

Fina’s chair faced HeelRiven, while the other chairs were turned away from her facing the wall. Fina’s restraints allowed her to move her arms up and down, but they were tied in a vice grip.

“Fina,” Mia said to her. “Don’t do it.”

HeelRiven snapped his fingers in Fina’s face, and she stared at him, grimacing.

What an asshole.

“You,” he said, pointing his finger at her. “You ruined my life.”

Fina blinked. “How so?”

“Seven million dollars has been withdrawn from my personal account,” he said. “That’s fraud, did you know that?”

“We’ll, I suppose that does count as identity theft,” she said. “Do you know who did this to you?”

He grabbed her by the hair and shook her. “No one at this company steals from me! You and Elaine and these bastards must have colluded to siphon money out of my account.”

Mia and Dee shrieked in terror. This wasn’t the man they thought they knew. The rest of her coworkers were crying or had their heads down, unable to look up.

Fina, however, didn’t have much of a reaction. She should be scared. She should be frightened. But her emotions were so numb. Still, seeing the people around her so scared made her feel compassion. She wanted to save them.

“I have nothing to do with Elaine,” Fina said. “None of us do. If you cared about the investigation then hire a lawyer.”

“If you have any sense of right and wrong,” Ryan said, ignoring her words. “Then you will atone for it.”

Ryan took out a tray with pills in it and a glass of water.

“You can’t be serious!” Mia said. “What are you doing!”

Fina looked at her, then back to the pills.

“No one here has to die. All that needs to happen is to vote for Fina to either live, or die. If you vote against sacrificing her, all of you will die. If you vote to have her take sole responsibility, I will pay each of you sixty thousand dollars to keep your mouths shut about whatever happens to her,” HeelRiven said.

“This is murder!” One of her coworkers said.

“One hundred thousand,” He said. “All deposited into your accounts if you let Fina take responsibility. Or I can have all of you executed.”

He walked out of the room. It was quiet.

Dee broke down crying. “I don’t want to die. The last thing I said to my fiancée was that I hated him. I don’t want that to be my last words to him.”

Fina looked at Dee, tears streaming down her face.

“I have to pick my kids up from school,” another coworker said. An older woman. “They have no one else but me.”

Fina was troubled.

All of this over seven million dollars? This man was a billionaire.

If he wanted her to kill herself over this trivial amount of money in comparison with his wealth, he must be out of his mind.

She hated Ryan HeelRiven. She hated him so much she wished he was dead.

Void.

All previous thoughts were gone. She took in a breath, for some reason, she couldn’t exhale. Her body froze and her throat felt like she had swallowed large stones.

“Fina!” Dee shouted. She tried to run over to Fina, but she was restrained in a chair. “Fina, you didn’t take the pills, did you?!”

Her eyes burned. She rocked back and forth in her chair, and knocked over the pills and water, sending them crashing to the ground.

Ryan stood outside of the room. He expected her to be a sobbing mess, admitting to her crimes and begging him to let her go.

Arnold was to keep watch on her from a camera stationed in the guest room.

Suddenly, he got a call from Arnold.

“Sir, should we call the hospital?”

“What are you seeing?” Ryan said. Last time he did this, the woman almost had a heart attack from being shocked. It was a close call, but he didn’t nearly do enough to this low woman to make her have a heart attack.

The pills were real, however. He needed them to be real so he could bring her back with medical care, and then interrogate her further. After all, why would an innocent person try to kill themselves?

“She’s convulsing,” he said. He sounded urgent.

There was a loud crash in the room next to him. Ryan swung open the doors and saw her on the floor, blood coming from her mouth and her eyes wide open.

“Call the hospital!” Ryan said as he picked her up. He dropped her immediately when he felt her body was colder than it should be.

Shit!

Every so often on the floor, Fina’s body twitched. Then after a few seconds, she stopped moving.

This wasn’t happening, Ryan thought. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. With shaking hands, he called Arnold and told him to not call the hospital and cancel any medical intervention.

They only called a doctor discreetly later, who confirmed that she had died from cardiac arrest.

Arnold stood in front of the body for a while. The situation went so out of control that no one had expected her to actually consume all the pills. It was supposed to be a scare tactic.

The screaming in the room was annoying to his ears, so he had her pathetic coworkers dragged out of the room and threatened. No one would be released until they signed an agreement that prevented them telling anyone about what they saw.

Arnold even suggested earlier that they use placebos or even sugar pills, but Ryan insisted on having them be real as to inflict pain upon her.

Ryan, after the initial shock, turned around and waved his hand. “Ok, that’s enough. Just bury her somewhere.”

Arnold blinked hard. “What?”

“Are you questioning me?”

Arnold shook his head. “No.”

Ryan left the room, leaving Arnold alone with the body. This woman just this morning had gone to work and now she won’t go home again.

Calling the police was out of the question. And with any luck, Arnold was sure that Ryan would be able to suppress the missing persons case before it even hit the news.