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“Not at all. Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact. I want to give you everything your heart desires.”
“And what is it you think I want?”
“Money, power, a home, maybe?”
Yeah, not even close. What I desperately wanted was to get out of here in one piece.
“You don’t know me if you think that.”
“Maybe you’re right. How about we remedy that?”
The man opened a file and handed me an old picture of my parents.
The portrait was taken over a year ago. My mother had been heavily pregnant with Audrey at the time, and we looked so freaking happy, it made me tear up.
“How did you get that?” I asked, as I furiously wiped away the teardrop on my face.
“It was on your mother’s Facebook account.”
“That’s not possible. I closed it after their death.”
“Come on, now, Ms.Murdoch. You and I both know, nothing is really gone on the Internet,” he stated as he crossed his fingers on top of my file and we stared at each other silently.
“How about we play a little game, Sarah?”
“What type of game?”
“You said I didn’t know you. Let me prove to you that you’re wrong. I bet you that by the time I finish reading your file, I will know all your deepest, darkest desires. If I’m correct, you will stay with us as my guest.”
“And if you’re not?”
“I will let you go.”
I neither agreed nor disagreed because this man was playing me. There was no way he’d go to all this trouble to get to me, just to let me go.
“Shall we begin? Your name is Sarah Murdoch, and you’re the oldest daughter of Diana and Glen Murdoch, who were killed earlier this year. You have a one-year-old sister you’re desperately trying to retrace.”
The knot inside my stomach grew wider when he mentioned Audrey.
“The only relative who could have taken you in was an uncle, but the man was killed during a raid in Afghanistan.
They placed you in three different foster homes before you ran away. Before that, you attended West End High with perfect grades.
High intelligence runs in your family. Your father could have been one of the brilliant minds of his generation, but he didn’t play well with others and got into an argument with his superior at Trinity College.
As a result, he got fired, and this put an enormous burden on your parent’s marriage. Your mother filed for divorce but removed her petition when she realized she was pregnant with your sister. How am I doing so far?”
Eerily accurate, I’d say. If the man’s intention was to scare me, he fully succeeded.
So, of course, I hid my terror and braved on. “This isn’t new. Anybody with a computer could have known those things.”
“You’re right.” He closed his notes and looked me in the eye before continuing his analysis.
“Winthrop Financials wasn’t the first time you hacked into a system, but they were your biggest target as of yet. You cracked their system to prove to yourself that you could do it, and you would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for your curiosity,” the man declared with a stiff smile.
“You feel like an outsider and spend 99% of your time by yourself.
The reason you were living in the library was most likely due to some form of abuse while you were in the foster care system. Although you wished it were otherwise, you have a problem with authority, and can’t back away when someone abuses their position.
