Chapter 138.

"If news broke, it would be the greatest scandal of the decade, one of which would lead to the demise of the entire firm. The hole they dug themselves into was just too deep to climb out of. They would face a lifetime in prison without any hope of freedom with all the dirt my sister gathered on them."

"After I coincidentally stumbled upon this juicy information, I cashed in on a favor my sister owed me. After some negotiations, she agreed that I could use the dirt she had on them as a bargaining chip in exchange for something she wanted. Essentially, they partner with my company, and they get out of having to pay to keep her quiet; it'll all be water under the bridge. They had no choice in the matter; we won the moment we stepped into the meeting, Mr. Genovese. It was checkmate long before the battle even began, and it's honestly thanks to you in more ways than one."

"Thanks to me? What do you mean by it's thanks to me? I clearly didn't do much in all of this; you and your sister took care of mostly everything, right?."

"Don't sweat it if you don't understand."

Why did her words sound unusually ominous to me?

"Hey, instead of staying at the hotel tonight, can I just return home on the first flight back? I suddenly have a bad feeling in my gut that something terrible will happen to me tonight. My history with hotels is not the best."

"What are you talking about? We only just got here, and you already want to leave? Besides, we'll be together tonight, what do you have to be fearful of?"

"You. How do I know you won't attack me in the middle of the night?"

"Don't worry; I promise I won't lay a single finger on you tonight."

"Can I really take your word for it?"

"Of course. I'm a woman of honor."

I'd undoubtedly be an idiot to believe that.

"Though I can't promise I won't subjugate you if you try to escape in the middle of the night."

From the bottom of my heart, I sincerely hated how sharp she was at times.

In the end, I wasn't able to find an opportunity to escape. Even on the way back to the hotel, when I said I had to use the toilet, she stood outside with her arms crossed and patiently waited for me like a bodyguard on guard duty. With her so overly cautious, on high alert to prevent my escape, I was certain something was up. As for what it specifically was, I was uncertain, but it had to be related to why she said it was all thanks to me.

Had she sold me out to the person who put a bounty on my head after she made full use of me? Was I about to be disposed of after I was no longer of use to her? Was I played by her again this entire time since the very beginning? Everything was just an elaborate act that I fell for?

Val rolled her eyes seemingly aware of what was on my mind and said, "Mr. Genovese, stop getting so worked up over nothing. Nothing will happen to you if you stay at the hotel with me tonight, I swear. You're too on edge lately, would you just try to relax?" She squished my cheeks together between both her hands as she tried to put my mind at ease.

There was still a sliver of doubt in my mind, but her reassurance did have an unusual sort of calming effect on a subconscious level. When someone was as good as her at reading people, it was scary how easily they were able to gain your trust when you showed them even the slightest sign of weakness.

"Sorry, my imagination was running wild again... I'm... fine now."

"Liar."

Once we returned to the hotel, to my relief, nothing out of the ordinary happened as I'd initially assumed. We watched a few movies together, ordered room service, downed several bottles of expensive wine, and ate all the fine cuisine they had to offer, on the house, before we inevitably got a bit tipsy from the liquor. At some unknown point, we went to bed uneventfully; there really wasn't anything strange, nor were there any unforeseen plot twists.

…

Dinggggggg.

I received an unexpected text that woke me up in the middle of the night. It read, "Meet me at the harbor at 3 AM on the dot. I'll take that problem off your hands."

It was only a few minutes until 3:00 AM. The sender was pretty demanding without any advance notice. I was naturally confused at first, but I still did as instructed. It was from a number I didn't recognize, but I thought I could use it as a chance to escape. If it turned out to be a text from Maria toying with me, then so be it. There's nobody I could contact that would help me escape from her. I knew I was grasping at straws by praying that some random stranger had discovered my situation and texted me anonymously with an offer to help me.

It was a long shot, but I took it anyway. Anything was better than being Maria's beloved experimental lab rat. Her love was too twisted for me to understand. I wanted a way out. No matter what price I paid for freedom, I'd take it without hesitation.

Even at this late hour, Maria was busy performing tests on one of her disposable groups of drug slaves. I used the chance while she wasn't around and snuck out. I'd worked hard to gain the little bit of freedom I had under her watch by displaying unwavering obedience toward her. No matter what type of messed up drug she administered to me I made sure not to resist her twisted form of love. Thanks to that, I was given a fair degree of freedom. Despite the trust I garnered from her, she still implanted a GPS tracker inside my body; however, through rigorous experimentation, I uncovered a method to temporarily fool the system into giving out a fake set of coordinates.

Though it still wasn't easy to take advantage of in practice as it only gave me fifteen minutes of freedom. After fifteen minutes passed by, my real coordinates would be given away.

When I went to sleep, the GPS tracking system similarly entered a low power saving mode deep sleep state. After I woke up, it took fifteen minutes before it released my next set of geographic coordinates. That was the only exploit I found in the GPS tracker she surgically implanted inside my body. Why it worked like that, I wasn't one hundred percent certain. I did have my theories on the matter, but the only thing I knew for sure was it definitely functioned in this manner.

It could have been a bug she wasn't aware of; however, it might have just been a careless programming mistake as well.

If intended to function this way, the best explanation I had was that it only woke up after it detected enough bodily motion, in conjunction with passive analysis of brainwaves and signals along neural synapses. As humans often moved about in their sleep and dreamed, it likely used multiple conditions before it determined when to wake up from power-saving mode.

Through trial and error, I established that when the amplitude of the signal was maintained at a specific minimum threshold for more than fifteen minutes, coupled with enough brain activity; it typically exited power-saving mode and revealed my geographic coordinates actively.

Though even with such knowledge, the only way to escape was if I had the assistance of an accomplice from the outside free from these cursed implanted GPS tracking devices. There was nobody around here that had such luck; everyone had them. I tried to jam the signal one time, but even that failed. It used technology that could counteract being jamming.

Maria was extremely cautious. So cautious that I was even skeptical about whether the bug I found was really there and not just something I contrived in my head. Perhaps it was even an elaborate trap set for me by Maria. I had no way to know for sure, but I wanted to escape tonight at all costs. I was so sick of this. I wanted my freedom back, a simple life with a normal woman who wasn't completely insane. That's all I wanted, but apparently, that was too much for me to ask for. I wasn't cut out for things like love. Things always turned out this way for me.