Four Hours After Death I Tricked Them Into Deadly Poison

Four hours after my death, a grotesque scene unfolded outside the cold morgue drawer where I lay. My husband, Victor, and my sister, Julia, were fighting for their livesnot over my inheritance, but in sheer terror.

Theyd found my suicide note, taped to the drawer: The one who murdered me drank a poison I call Crimson Truth three hours ago. In twenty-four hours, it will eat through their gut.

Detectives watched calmly as Victor, sweating and desperate, grabbed the medical examiner. Extract her memoriesnow! The antidotes in her brain!

Julia screamed, pulling at him. Are you insane? The police are here! Theyll see everything!

Victor slapped her. Without the antidote, were dead! This is our only chance!

They thought they were racing the clock. They didnt know this was only the opening act of the game Id designed for them.

As the machine powered on, a hologram filled the room. The first image was from my own eyes: me holding two glasses of red wine, toasting an empty room.

My voice echoed, My darlings, the show has just begun.

Who, do you think, will be the first to lose control?

...

The air conditioning in the morgue was blasting, but beads of sweat still rolled down Victors forehead like marbles. He clutched his stomach, his face as pale as a freshly painted wall, and made a dry, retching sound, like he had a fishbone caught in his throat.

"Detective Grant, I'm formally requesting an immediate memory extraction! Now!" Victor's voice trembled with the primal fear of death.

Detective Grant stood with his arms crossed, his gaze as sharp as a hawk's. It swept over Victors contorted face and then to Julia, who had collapsed in a heap on the floor.

"Mr. Blackwood, memory extraction requires the signed consent of the next of kin. And the police must be present to record the entire procedure." Grant paused, a hint of dark amusement in his tone. "If anything... incriminating... should appear in those memories, say, evidence of a murder, it will be admissible in court."

Victors head snapped up, his eyes a web of red veins.

He knew exactly what that meant.

But he also knew that without the antidote, in less than twenty-four hours, his insides would rot away, just as my note described.

"I'll sign! I'll sign it!"

Victor snatched the consent form, the tip of his pen tearing the paper. His signature was a frantic, illegible scrawl.

Julia scrambled up from the floor and grabbed his sleeve, her nails digging into his flesh.

"Victor! Don't! Those are her memories! What if... what if..."

What if what, Julia?

What if they showed the two of you collaborating to swap my heart medication with fakes?

Or what if there was a close-up of you, my dear sister, pouring the poison into my glass with your own two hands?

Victor threw her off with such force that she slammed against a morgue drawer with a sickening thud.

"Get off me! If you want to die, don't drag me down with you!" he screamed, his voice raw with hysteria. "As long as I get the antidote, we can deal with the rest later! What good is 'later' if we're dead?!"

Julia clutched her bruised shoulder, tears streaming down her face, but the dominant emotion in her eyes was terror.

She was afraid of dying, too.

She knew better than anyone that my title as a "master perfumer" wasn't just for show. The poisons I concocted, only I could undo.

Their lawyer, Mr. Ferguson, adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses and wiped a sheen of sweat from his brow before leaning in to whisper in Victor's ear.

"Mr. Blackwood, as long as there's no direct footage of the act itself, we have room to build a defense. Survival is the priority right now."

Ferguson was a smart man, and a survivor. He knew that if Victor died, all the shady asset transfers hed helped orchestrate would come to light. This was his best bet.

Grant gave a sharp nod. Technicians moved forward, attaching the complex web of electrodes to my cold scalp.

"Instrument activated. Commencing memory extraction."

The giant holographic screen flickered twice, then blazed to life.

The scene was from my perspective, twenty-four hours before my death.

I was in my private laboratory.

Reagent bottles in a rainbow of colors lined the countertops. I was wearing a white lab coat, a dropper in my hand.

Victor and Julia held their breath, their eyes glued to the screen, terrified of missing a single detail.

In the memory, I was mixing a strange, crimson liquid. The red was so vibrant it looked like freshly drawn venous blood.

As I carefully added droplets of a reagent, I murmured to myself, my tone so cheerful it was chilling.

"A double dose for Victor's glass. That leech has had a growing appetite lately."

"And a triple dose for Julia's. She is my dear sister, after all. She deserves a more... thorough experience."

As I spoke, the red liquid bubbled in the beaker, releasing thin wisps of white smoke.

In the morgue, Julia let out a strangled cry and threw up on the floor, a bitter mix of stomach acid and bile.

Victors legs gave out, and he collapsed to his knees, his hands clawing at his own throat as if the red liquid were already searing his esophagus.

"The antidote... where's the antidote..." he whimpered, his eyes losing focus.

On the screen, my memory-self held up the freshly mixed "poison," looked directly into the cameradirectly at themand smiled a terrible, knowing smile.

"Patience. The game has just begun."

I turned and poured the red liquid into a wine decanter, which held Victor's favorite bottle of Romane-Conti.

Victors pupils dilated to pinpricks.

He remembered.

Last night, to celebrate my "unexpected" death, he and Julia had finished that entire bottle.

They hadn't left a single drop.

Fear, like a giant, invisible hand, clamped down on his heart. He thought he was drinking the wine of victory. In reality, it was his ticket to hell.

And I was waiting for him at the gates, smiling.

At that moment, Victor's sanity shattered. He lay on the floor like a dying animal, gasping for air, his eyes filled with a desperate will to live.

"Detective! Help me! Get me to a hospital! Pump my stomach! Now!"

Detective Grant watched him with a cold, clinical detachment, as if observing a clown's pathetic performance.

"Mr. Blackwood, the M.E. has already checked your vitals. They're perfectly stable. You're showing no signs of poisoning."

Victors head snapped up, his eyes bulging.

"Impossible! The note was clear! And the memory... that red stuff! I drank all of it!"

It was strawberry juice, I added silently in my mind.

With a little food coloring and a dash of capsaicin to give it a kick.

Unfortunately for them, the dead can't speak, and the living are easily blinded by fear.

"It could have a delayed onset! Michelle was a psycho, she loved playing these kinds of twisted games!" Julia shrieked, her voice a piercing nail on a chalkboard. "Take us to a hospital! We need blood tests!"

"It's no use," Mr. Ferguson interjected suddenly, his face ashen. "You know Ms. Reed's level of expertise. Any poison she created would be undetectable by conventional tests."

That statement was the final straw.

Victors eyes fluttered shut in despair, then snapped open again, fixing on the screen.

"Keep watching! There has to be an antidote! She would have left herself a way out!"

The memory continued to play.

The timeline jumped to three hours before the incident.

The scene was our living room. Victor was on the sofa, whispering with Mr. Ferguson.

Ferguson held a document, his expression nervous.

"Mr. Blackwood, Ms. Reed still hasn't signed these stock transfer papers. If she were to... suddenly... could there be complications?"

Victor let out a cold laugh, swirling the "spiked" wine in his glass.

"Don't worry. After tonight, she won't be in any condition to sign anything."

In the morgue, Detective Grant's expression sharpened instantly. He turned his head and locked his gaze on Mr. Ferguson.

Mr. Ferguson froze, a river of cold sweat running down his temple. He instinctively reached for a glass of water on the table, but his hand trembled so badly that he knocked it over. It shattered on the floor, the sound echoing in the silent morgue.

The sudden noise drew everyone's attention.

And in that precise instant, on the screen, my memory-self turned her head.

I wasn't looking at Victor or Ferguson. My gaze was fixed on the massive floor-to-ceiling mirror in the living room.

Through the mirror's reflection, my eyes seemed to pierce through the screen, landing directly on the Mr. Ferguson of the present.

"Don't bother, Detective," my voice from the memory said, cool, confident, and laced with mockery. "Pay attention to the lawyer's hand."

Grant whipped his head around, his eyes like daggers, pinning Ferguson's right hand, which he hadn't managed to retract in time.

His hand was creeping toward his pocket, where a miniature signal jammer was hidden. One press, and the memory extractor's power would be cut, corrupting the data.

It was their last-ditch effort to save themselves.

Too bad I saw it coming.

"Take your hand out of your pocket! Now!" Grant barked. Two officers were on Ferguson in a second, twisting his arms behind his back and pulling the black device from his pocket.

Victor stared at the scene, utterly dumbfounded. He looked from the jammer to my image on the screen as if he were seeing a ghost.

"How... How did she know?"

My memory-self couldn't hear him, of course. But I had seen Ferguson's furtive movements in the mirror.

I let out a soft laugh, then pulled a folded lab report from a drawer and waved it in the air.

"Victor, did you really think I wouldn't notice you'd swapped my heart medication?"

The lab report was clearly visible. Under "Chemical Analysis," one simple ingredient was listed: Vitamin C.

In the morgue, Victor leaped to his feet as if he'd been electrocuted.

"That's slander! It's fake! She was paranoid! That was expensive imported medicine I bought for her!" he roared, trying to drown his guilt with sheer volume.

But Grant just stared at him coldly, the red light of his body camera blinking, faithfully recording every word.

"We'll see if it's slander once we analyze the residual medication in the deceased's system," Grant said. His words were a bucket of ice water, extinguishing Victor's last spark of hope.

Victor slumped into a chair, his eyes vacant. He knew the suspicion of murder was now impossible to shake.

But he couldn't stop.

The thought of his intestines rotting was far more terrifying than a prison sentence.

"The antidote... I need the antidote..." he chanted like a broken record, his eyes fixed on the screen as if it were his only salvation.

The memory moved forward.

My on-screen self casually tossed the lab report into the trash and walked toward the safe in the study.

I entered the combination, opened the door, and took out a small, elegant vial. It contained a blue liquid that shimmered under the light with an eerie glow.

"This is the antidote," I said to the empty room. I then placed the vial inside a portable lockbox and secured it.

"The most dangerous place is the safest place," I said, patting the box, a cryptic smile playing on my lips.

"I mailed it... to Detective Grant at the precinct."

As those words echoed, the air in the morgue seemed to solidify.

Every single person, in perfect unison, turned to stare at Detective Grant.

Even Grant was taken aback, his brow furrowing.

"Detective! Quickly! Check the mailroom!" Victor scrambled toward Grant like a drowning man lunging for a life raft, only to be blocked by an officer.

"Stay put!"

Grant waved a hand, dispatching one of his men. A few minutes later, the officer returned, holding a black package.

"Sir, there's a package. Same-day city courier. It just arrived."

Victors eyes lit up with a greedy, nauseating glint.

"It's the antidote! It has to be! Give it to me!"

Julia staggered to her feet, trying to lunge for it as well.

Grant pressed his hand firmly on the package, his cold eyes sweeping over them. "This is evidence. It has to be processed before it can be opened."

"No processing! It can't be exposed to light!" Victor shrieked, his voice cracking under the strain. "Michelle said in the memory, the antidote is photolabile! It has to be consumed immediately!"

I had indeed said that.

In the memory, after locking the box, I had turned to the camera and added, "This stuff is very delicate. Three seconds of light and it's useless. And... only Victor's fingerprint can open it."

This was the first trap I'd set for him.

Grant looked at the complex mechanical lock on the package, then at Victors trembling hands.

"If your fingerprint is the only one that works, then you open it." Grant placed the package on a table and took a step back, his hand never leaving the butt of his gun. "But I'm warning you, if this contains anything dangerous, you'll face the consequences."

Victor was far beyond caring about consequences. His mind was consumed by the image of that blue liquid. His life.

He reached out a trembling hand and pressed his thumb to the fingerprint scanner.

Beep. A green light flashed.

The box sprang open.

Victor and Julia practically dove headfirst into it.

But a second later, their expressions froze.

There was no blue liquid.

There was only an empty glass vial and a small, folded piece of paper.

"It's empty? How can it be empty?!" Julia screamed, grabbing the vial and shaking it violently, as if she could conjure the liquid from thin air.

Victor picked up the note, his hands shaking like a leaf in a storm.

There was only one line, written in my elegant script, yet it radiated an icy chill:

"The antidote is volatile, so I only left the raw materials. They are hidden inside the weapons you used to kill me."

The blood drained from Victor's face.

The weapons?

The golf club he had used to smash the vial of my real heart medication?

Julia's makeup bag, where she had concealed the vial of poison?

He hadn't had time to dispose of them. The police had arrived too quickly, forcing him to hide everything back in plain sight.

Now, this note had backed them into a corner.

To live, they would have to personally hand over the instruments of their crime.

This was the second trap. A trap of their own making.

"Where? Where are the weapons?" Grant's voice was sharp, his eyes catching the flicker of panic on Victor's face.

Victor gritted his teeth, the veins on his forehead bulging. He was making his final calculation.

Hand over the weapons and admit to murder.

Refuse, and wait to die.

The twenty-four-hour countdown was a sword hanging over his head, each passing second a reminder of his impending, agonizing end.

"At... at home," Victor finally croaked, his voice raspy.

"Take me there... to get the... items."

He didn't dare call them weapons.

Grant let out a cold laugh and waved his hand.

"Take them away! To the crime scene!"

Police sirens ripped through the night as the convoy, filled with desperate and guilty souls, sped toward the place that was once called "home."

The place where my life had ended.

And where the truth was about to be born.