I Am Not Your Pawn Anymore

“Barrett handed me a Montblanc pen and a legal document, his voice as cold as the rain lashing against his Tribeca penthouse. He told me to sign an admission of guilt for an SEC violation I never committed. "Eighteen months in prison, Anaya," he said, adjusting his cufflinks without looking at me. "The trust fund is set up. You'll get twenty million dollars the moment you step out." I was being sold. The man I had loved for ten years, the man whose secrets I had kept, was trading my freedom to save his merger with Adele Townsend. He had scrubbed the digital logs of Adele's illegal trades and pinned everything on me. When I refused, he didn't see my heartbreak; he only saw a malfunction in a business transaction. "Do not speak her name," he hissed when I mentioned Adele's fraud. "This merger is bigger than you." He forced the pen into my hand, calling me dramatic while his security guards dragged me to a locked bedroom to "cool down." I spent three days parched and starving, listening to the muffled sound of champagne corks popping down the hall. They were celebrating my destruction. My heart finally gave out in that luxury cage, the darkness swallowing me as I realized I was nothing more than a disposable asset to him. I died in that room, alone and betrayed by the person I trusted most. How could he do this? How could a decade of loyalty be worth less than a stock price? Why did I let him treat me like a sacrificial lamb for so long? GASP. I shot up in bed, my lungs burning, but I wasn't in the penthouse. I was in my old, peeling Brooklyn apartment, and the date on my phone was May 12th-three years ago. My phone buzzed with a text from Barrett: "Where are you? Bring the Townsend files. Now." A cold, cruel smile touched my lips as I typed the reply that would start his nightmare. "I quit."”