I was two time zones away, closing a seven-figure deal, when my doorbell camera lit up. It wasn’t a delivery driver. It was my parents—and a moving truck backing into my driveway.
I watched my brother carry boxes through my front door like he owned the place, while a stranger unfolded a lease with my forged signature on it. That was the moment I stopped being the good daughter and started designing a trap they would never see coming. My name is Laya Price.
I’m thirty-two years old, and for the last five years I’ve built my entire identity around being the person who sees the disaster before it happens. At Heliobridge Risk Systems, my job title is Senior Cyber Risk Analyst—which is just corporate speak for professional paranoid. I get paid a very comfortable salary to look at a company’s architecture, find the one loose brick that could bring the whole wall down, and tell them exactly how much it will cost to fix it.
I’m good at this. I’m precise. I’m logical.
And I was arrogant enough to believe that my ability to predict threats applied to my personal life. I was in Boston, sitting in a conference room that smelled of stale coffee and dry-erase markers, listening to a man in a three-thousand-dollar suit talk about synergy. I was the only person in my family to own property.
Not rent. Not lease. Not stay with a friend until things pick up.
Own. My house in Portland was a 1920s Craftsman bungalow that I bought with my own money, renovated with my own hands, and defended with a ferocity that confused my parents. To them, a house was a communal asset.
To me, it was the only place on earth where I did not have to be the responsible older sister. It was my sanctuary. Or so I thought.
The first vibration on my wrist was subtle. arrow_forward_iosĐọc thêm
Pause
00:00
00:02
01:49
Mute
My smartwatch was set to Do Not Disturb for everything except emergency contacts and security alerts. I ignored it.
We were in the middle of closing a massive contract with a logistics firm, and I was taking notes on their encryption protocols. Then it buzzed again—longer, insistent. A hard pulse against my radius bone.
I glanced down, keeping my face neutral. The small OLED screen flashed a single line of text in bright red:
Front door. Motion detected.
I frowned. It was two o’clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday in Portland. The mail carrier had already come and gone.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
