Page 69 of The Fix

Posey was good at waiting. She’d been waiting for decades now, since she was an eighteen-year-old girl. But never, in all that time, had her hope soared quite as high as it did now.

Despite her practiced patience, it had been a very long night.

Please don’t let me down.

Her hope wasn’t baselessly contingent on the competency of others, however. She’d calculated and crunched numbers. She’d “war-gamed,” as her father used to say. And so now, all she could do was trust that the man she counted on was exactly as she perceived him to be.

She couldn’t possibly do what needed to be done next without him.

Posey heard the distant ringing of the doorbell, the ventilator quickening along with her breath. Calm, calm. Remain calm.

Posey closed her eyes. The waiting was almost over. Ten minutes, she’d calculated. No more than twelve.

If you ever try to tell anyone what happened that night, or if you attempt something stupid, I will unplug you, Posey, do you hear me? Or I’ll put you in the dark, and I’ll leave you there. No windows. No sunshine. Be grateful for what I give you. I don’t have to give you anything at all.

After the attack and the accident that was no accident, she’d spent two years wishing to die—grieving both the catastrophic loss of her mobility and the terrible betrayal she’d suffered.

“Kill me,” she’d told her brother from the hospital bed he’d set up in her room, and maybe that’s why he’d kept her alive.

Then, one day, Anton arrived with a newspaper in his hands and read from an article.

Tatum Devore, the man who had left her surrounded by evil, had drunk a bottle of whiskey and jumped off a ten-story roof.

Anton thought it would devastate her.

But instead, Posey decided to live.

She decided to calculate.

She’d had so little to work with, and so many things had gone wrong too many times. She’d remained steadfast, however, confident in her own abilities, patient despite such incredibly limited resources.

No use of either her hands or her feet. No mobility at all without her chair.

Strict controls over any technology. No phone.

Only caregivers that Anton had approved of in advance, which was to say, strict rule followers with little to no empathy for a helpless, wheelchair-bound young woman.

Two had been vicious, the others merely cold.

Lucky for Posey, Anton didn’t know a thing about technology, and neither did the brutes who changed her bedding and shoved spoons into her mouth.

In recent years, Anton didn’t realize that Posey’s modern wheelchair had Bluetooth and other technologies, features that Posey had quickly mastered.

He was clueless that the voice-assistive device that she used to communicate with her caregivers had wireless connectivity.

He wasn’t aware that Posey only pretended to have lost the ability to speak on her own.

What Anton did know was how to fail and squander.

He excelled at running the family business into the ground.

He was doing it now, but Posey had finally managed to break into the digital files—and then moved copies to the dark web.

Files and communications that connected Anton to one sloppy “fix” after another.

It’d taken many years, but she had time. She had plenty of that.

As she’d waded through the projects, she’d come across the planned ambush and terrorization of a judge in Aspen Cove, Virginia, and his wife and daughters.

Anton had hired two petty criminals, men who were certainly incompetent but came at a very cheap price.

They were convenient fall guys if something went wrong, Posey admitted that much.

However, Anton wasn’t qualified to run a lemonade stand, much less a complex business empire.

The two men had been told to make the crime appear random by following the women and being “caught” on camera.

Posey had thought about how to give the family motivation to act, to prepare, with her limited resources and also so as not to tip Anton off that she’d interfered.

Her options were extremely sparse, especially back then, before she’d honed her skills using the series of devices, connected through often unpredictable portals.

Perhaps the concept of a do-over came to her first because of her own longing for such a chance.

Such a possibility. If only she could have a do-over.

If only she could fix what she’d played a part in breaking.

If only she hadn’t trusted Tatum. If only she’d understood the depths of her brother’s unmatched evil.

If only she could find a way to reclaim her freedom. Would you like a do-over, Posey?

Yes, yes, please. A thousand times, yes.

A do-over, she surmised, was personal. It was motivating. And it applied in each case. After all, each “fix” the Kiss family was hired to correct had begun with a crime, or a mistake. Or sometimes simple stupidity.

Do you want to go back and do it again, differently this time?

Each step was another victory for Posey. Recording her messages online, and then running them through a voice-modification generator before storing them on her device. Using the internet to make the call to the Cortlandts’ home number, among so many other steps.

Part of her, at least, had relished the challenge, as she’d found ways to accomplish what was essentially impossible. It’d taken her right up to the day before the planned assault. Any portion of it could have failed, but it did not.

Mrs. Cortlandt, unfortunately, had intercepted the call meant for the judge. And then she’d become the faulty link in Posey’s equation.

Even if Mrs. Cortlandt had gone to the site Posey had provided her, she wouldn’t have recognized the man her husband had let out onto the streets rather than leaving him in prison, where he deserved to be.

But she might have seen the mug shots of the two men being sent to terrorize her family.

Perhaps she’d have been on the lookout for them.

Maybe she’d have alerted the police when they began following her and her daughter Eleanor. She’d have been aware.

But it didn’t transpire that way.

The odds were bad; Posey knew that. She’d crunched the numbers and considered the variables. She knew success was unlikely. Still, considering all her effort, it’d been frustrating. And even worse that the crime had gone afoul, as she’d suspected it would, though not nearly to the extent it had.

True to form, the two junkies had ensured the job went sideways.

Anton still visited her regularly. He enjoyed showing her a photo of the state-run facility she’d be sent to, as specified by his will.

“If anything happens to me, Posey, whether it be death or imprisonment, this is where you’ll go.

There will be no money. I’ve left that, and the estate, to charitable foundations that you’ll never touch.

But now, you don’t touch anything anymore, do you, Posey Pose?

” And then he’d grinned as Posey’s gaze moved over the photo he’d somehow managed to attain of the deplorable conditions within the facility.

Sometimes Posey thought it would be worthwhile to forward what evidence she’d gathered anyway, even if she ended up in state-run hell.

But then again, she’d have no high-tech device, no custom wheelchair with Bluetooth.

Anton had given her gifts, whether he knew it or not, and even if it was mostly for appearance’s sake so the doctors who examined her wouldn’t ask questions, she coveted those things all the same.

They were allowing her to ruin him.

Slowly. But surely.

Posey continued to find more ways to access electronics and inventive methods of connecting to sites and files previously out of reach.

She secretly read news sources and knew what was going on in the outside world, far beyond the prison where she was kept, locked not only in her room, but in her broken body.

She pretended to be weak and scared. Anton liked it that way.

The more failures the business suffered due to Anton’s incompetency, the more distracted he became. That was good for Posey.

She took great pleasure from hearing him curse and rage when another one of his “fixes” was stopped by the intended target.

He didn’t understand how or why. The Kiss family business’s reputation plummeted.

Contracts dwindled. No one wanted to use services with such a high likelihood of failure, when failure in these instances meant complete collapse of a client’s life.

Posey heard voices and footsteps from below, echoing in the marble halls.

The man who’d entered was speaking to the butler at the door.

There would be others around too—Anton had layers of security.

Was anyone suspicious? Had they called Anton in another time zone?

There was only a small likelihood they would. But still ... hurry, hurry .

The ventilator broadcast the push and pull of her diaphragm. She didn’t have to remind herself to breathe. The machine did it for her.

Sometimes, depending on the circumstances, she simply removed an unseen link so that a fix failed.

She’d given others a chance for a do-over, too, over the years in cases where do-overs made sense.

Most had failed, but a couple had not. She wasn’t privy to each detail of the job outline.

She didn’t always know when or how or where.

The do-over targets had to do the legwork, literally.

She could only give what she was able to steal and no more.

She’d gotten better at it over the years.

Posey began to improve in her offers. She left no trail, especially not for Anton to find.

And then eventually, she completed the one final task she’d been attempting for years.

The coup de grace.

It’d taken her over a decade of failed attempts, but she’d successfully hacked Anton’s passwords for his bank accounts.

The sums therein were much lower than they should have been—their father had left his children a fortune, and Anton had already squandered much of it.

But there was enough. Enough for Posey to live comfortably for the rest of her life.

She closed her eyes as she waited, finding calm in going back over her latest success. Cami Cortlandt had responded beautifully to her offer of a do-over. Cami, who’d once survived such a vicious attack—the reason that Posey felt an affinity for the young woman.

Posey had only had the video of the boy and some basic information to send.

She knew neither the time nor the place.

Cami figured that all out on her own. Posey had later hacked into the police database in Big Sur, California, and read the police report.

She and a man named Alexander Lowe had rescued Cami’s son from the traffickers Anton had sold him to in order to recoup some of their family fortune he’d squandered away.

The deal was unnecessarily cruel—no surprise there—but it’d bought them time.

Alexander Lowe.

She’d looked him up, and then she’d begun to wonder if there was more opportunity in this case than she’d first considered.

It was time, after all, for Posey to plan her escape.

The police weren’t safe—some of them were clients.

Others were pawns. She could transfer evidence to the FBI, but unless Anton was surprised in a six a.m. raid, he’d have time to kill her.

And she had no doubt he wouldn’t hesitate to do so.

He might be taken, but he’d take her with him if he could.

Or she’d wind up in the state-run pit of despair, no access to the family trust, squandered though it was.

And so, she’d found a way to get Rex the information he’d need to begin to unravel the case she knew he was working on.

She’d waited in the one location she’d figured he would eventually show—Hollis Barclay’s campaign website.

She’d only had moments to communicate and almost dropped her tool in haste.

But he’d obviously worked her message out.

He was as impressive as she’d banked on. Literally.

Posey leaned down and used that same tool now, held in her teeth to press the keys on her voice device, transferring the money from Anton’s personal and business accounts to the accounts she’d opened under a corporate entity in a foreign country.

She watched, her eyes held to the screen as two sets of footsteps approached her room.

The transfer completed just as the door opened, and Posey dropped the tool to her lap.

The butler walked through first, followed by a tall, broad-shouldered man with jet-black hair, carrying a medical bag and wearing a crisp white coat. He smiled. Rex Lowe. He was even more handsome than the photo she’d seen online.

“Josephine,” the butler said, “Dr. Ellingson here for your appointment.”

“Hello, Josephine,” Rex said as he stepped forward and bowed his head slightly, medical bag gripped in both hands. Her heart soared, but she held back her smile.

Rex glanced over at the butler. “May we have some privacy, sir?”

“Of course. I’ll be right outside the door.”

The butler exited, shutting the door softly behind him. Rex turned back her way and then walked to her wheelchair and squatted down next to her and took her hands in his. “I’m assuming you know another way out of here,” he said.

Posey grinned then, a small victorious laugh bubbling from her mouth. Oh, she hadn’t used her voice in so long, too long, so she did it joyfully now. “Yes, Mr. Lowe, but you’ll be required to carry me.”