Chapter 4 - The Unmasking
I didn't wait for Arthur to object. I didn't wait for Flynn to scramble out of his chair.
With a slow, deliberate motion, I stood up from the head of the table. The silence in the dining room was now absolute, broken only by the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway—counting down the seconds.
I reached out my hand and grasped the heavy black velvet shroud concealing the six-foot easel behind my chair.
"Mabel, don't you dare," Flynn hissed, finally leaping to his feet, his chair screeching backward against the hardwood floor. His face was pale, slick with cold sweat. "Sit down right now! What the hell is wrong with you?"
"Sit down, Flynn," I commanded, my voice carrying an iron authority that froze him in his tracks.
I pulled the velvet shroud straight up and off the easel in one fluid motion.
The six-foot photographic print was revealed under the harsh, direct glare of the crystal chandelier.
The dining room erupted into a collective gasp of pure, unadulterated shock.
There it was, in terrifying, crystal-clear high definition: Flynn, sound asleep in our bed, his arm wrapped tightly around Selina, her red manicured nails resting across his naked chest against my silk pillowcase, beneath the spooky Halloween garland and our crooked wedding portrait.
And emblazoned in bold, elegant cursive across the bottom of the frame were Selina’s exact words:
Poor little wife. Some women are born to be chosen. Some are born to clean up after us.
For three seconds, nobody breathed. The room was paralyzed in a nightmare of exposed, undeniable reality.
Then, Arthur Sterling stood up.
The patriarch’s face turned a violent, apoplectic shade of purple. He stared at the photograph, his eyes darting from the image of his wife—his glamorous, devoted second wife—clinging to his only son in the matrimonial bed of the home he had funded.
"Selina..." Arthur whispered, his voice trembling with a terrifying, seismic rage. "What... what is this?"
Selina stood up so fast her chair toppled backward onto the Persian rug with a dull thud. Her mask of cool sophistication shattered completely, replaced by a mask of rabid panic.
"Arthur, it's a fake!" she shrieked, pointing a shaking finger at the canvas. "It's AI! It’s Photoshop! Mabel is unstable, she’s obsessed, she fabricated the whole thing to destroy our family!"
"AI?" I asked smoothly, walking around the table, my heels clicking rhythmically against the floor. I reached into the pocket of my emerald gown and pulled out a small, sleek tablet. "That's interesting, Selina. Because when I downloaded the raw metadata from the cloud sync linked to your private phone—the one you thought Flynn was texting on while you were in bed together—it didn't say anything about artificial intelligence."
I tapped the screen, and instantly, the surround-sound speakers hidden in the corners of the dining room projected a crystal-clear audio recording into the space.
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“Make sure you delete the raw file before she wakes up,” Selina’s unmistakable voice purred through the speakers. “She’s too dull to notice the pillowcase, but if she finds the earrings I left on the nightstand, we’ll have to listen to her whine.”
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