Chapter 1: The Discard
Do not board. We told the senator’s family you are in rehab. Your presence ruins the aesthetic. We gave your first-class seat to the dog.
My mother’s text hit my phone like a physical slap, the vibration buzzing against my palm as I stood in the middle of Terminal 4. I stared at the screen, the words blurring slightly under the harsh fluorescent lights of the airport. I didn’t even have time to blink before the second notification popped up, slicing through the shock.
It was my sister, Brittany, posting live from seat 1A. The seat I had paid for.
The photo was a masterpiece of curated cruelty. She was holding her French bulldog, Pierre, who was wearing a cashmere sweater that probably cost more than my first car. He was pouting for the camera, oblivious to the fact that he was sitting in a seat meant for a human being—me. The caption read: Finally got rid of the bad energy. #FamilyCleanse #AspenBound.
I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream at the gate agent, who was currently announcing the final boarding call for Flight 882 to Aspen. I just stared at the screen, and for the first time in my twenty-nine years, the familiar, crushing sadness didn’t come. There was no wave of inadequacy, no desperate urge to fix it.
Instead, there was only calculation. A cold, hard arithmetic settling in my chest.
They thought they were discarding me. They thought I was just another appliance they could unplug and toss aside when it stopped being useful. They didn’t realize they had just declared war on the wrong defense contractor.
I turned around, the wheels of my carry-on gliding silently over the terrazzo floor. I wasn’t going to Aspen to join them, begging for a scrap of their affection. I was going to bury them.
I walked through the terminal, the noise of the holiday crowd fading into a dull roar behind the pounding in my ears. I am twenty-nine years old. To my family, I am Briona, the struggling freelance IT consultant who lives in a studio apartment and drives a five-year-old sedan. They think I scrape by. They think I need their approval to feel significant.
They have no idea.
They don’t know that last month, I negotiated a six-hundred-million-dollar cyber logistics contract for the Department of Defense. They don’t know that my “studio apartment” is a decoy address I use for mail, while my real home is a fifteen-million-dollar fortress of glass and steel built into the side of a mountain in Aspen. They don’t know that I could buy the airline we were supposed to fly on with the liquidity in my checking account.
I stopped at a kiosk to buy a bottle of water, my hand shaking slightly as I tapped my card. Not from sadness—from the sheer, blinding clarity of it all.
For years, I had been the silent architect of their comfort. I remembered the day Brittany graduated college. My mother, Constance, had pulled me aside, tears welling in her perfectly mascaraed eyes, whispering that the eighty-thousand-dollar student loan debt was crushing the family.
“We just want her to start fresh, Briona,” she had said, clutching my arm. “You’re the only one who can help.”
I paid it off the next morning. I didn’t get a thank you. I got a text from Brittany asking if I could also cover her “post-grad decompression trip” to Bali. I paid for that, too.
Flashbacks hit me like physical blows as I walked toward the exit. The car I bought Constance when hers broke down. The deposit for the Aspen rental they were staying in right now—a rental I had secured because Constance claimed her credit card was “having issues.” I had been their safety net, their bank, their fixer.
I thought I was buying love. I thought if I was useful enough, if I solved enough problems, they would finally keep me.
But that’s the trap of the utility relationship. In a toxic family, you aren’t a person. You are an appliance. You are a toaster. You are a lawnmower. You are kept around exactly as long as you perform a function. And the moment they find a shiny new appliance that does the job better—like a fiancé with a senator for a father—you aren’t just demoted. You are discarded.
They don’t put the old toaster in the guest room. They throw it in the trash.
Constance didn’t uninvite me because she was ashamed of me. She uninvited me because she had upgraded her supply. The senator’s son, Chad, offered prestige and power—things my “freelance” money couldn’t buy in her eyes. I had served my purpose. I was the bridge they walked over to get to the good life.
And now that they were there, they were burning me down.
I stepped out of the sliding doors into the biting cold of the airport pickup zone. I took a deep breath, letting the freezing wind sting my face. They thought they had broken me. They thought I would go back to my fake studio apartment and cry into a pillow.
They forgot that my job isn’t just building networks. It’s dismantling threats.
I pulled out my phone and opened my banking app. My balance wasn’t a number. It was a weapon. They wanted a narrative where I was the crazy, unstable failure in rehab? Fine. I would give them a story, but it wouldn’t be the one they were expecting.
I wasn’t going to be the victim in their little Aspen fairytale. I was going to be the director.
My phone buzzed against my palm. I expected another taunt from Brittany, or perhaps a demand for money from my mother disguised as an emergency. Instead, it was a priority alert from my bank.
Security Warning. Transaction Declined. Amount: $200,000. Merchant: Rolex Boutique, Aspen. Card ending in 8841.
I stopped walking. The crowd flowed around me, people hugging and loading luggage, but the world went silent.
I stared at the last four digits. That wasn’t my personal Amex. That wasn’t my business account. That was the heavy, matte black titanium card I kept locked in a fireproof box in my old bedroom at my mother’s house. The card issued directly by the Department of Defense for classified procurement logistics.
Constance had raided my room. She must have found the box, broken the lock, and seen the black card. She didn’t know what it was. To her, it just looked like a symbol of the wealth I had been hiding. She saw a limitless credit line she could use to buy a bribe for her new, fancy son-in-law.
She was trying to buy Chad a Rolex with my money to secure her place in high society.
A normal daughter would panic. A normal daughter would call the bank, scream fraud, and shut it down to save her mother from prison. I hovered my thumb over the “Deny” button. If I pressed it, the transaction would fail. Constance would be embarrassed at the register. Maybe she’d have to use her own card, or maybe she’d have to walk away. But she would be safe. It would just be a family squabble.
But then I remembered the text. We gave your seat to the dog.
I remembered the years of being the ATM. I remembered the way she looked at me when I paid off her mortgage—not with gratitude, but with expectation. She didn’t just want my money. She felt entitled to it. And now, she felt entitled to steal it.
I moved my thumb.
If I authorized this, it wasn’t just theft. It wasn’t a civil dispute I could drop later when she cried and begged. This was federal funds. This was taxpayer money allocated for cyber defense infrastructure. By using this card for personal luxury goods, Constance wasn’t just stealing from me. She was embezzling from the United States government.
The moment that charge went through, a flag would be raised in a server room in Virginia. An investigation would open automatically. There would be no taking it back. There would be no “it was a misunderstanding.” There would only be federal agents and mandatory minimum sentencing.
My mother wanted to play the big game. She wanted to exist in a world of high stakes and power. Fine. I would give her the full experience.
I tapped the button marked Authorize Transaction.
A second later, the confirmation flashed on the screen. Transaction Approved.
Somewhere in Aspen, Constance was probably smiling at the sales clerk, handing over a watch she thought was a gift from her freelance daughter’s secret stash. She was fastening a platinum handcuff around her own wrist, and she didn’t even know it.
The trap wasn’t just set; it was welded shut.
Chapter 2: The Rejects
I put the phone back in my pocket. The coldness in my chest spread, settling into a hard, diamond-like calm. I wasn’t going home to cry. I had a party to plan.
I didn’t browse travel sites for a last-minute economy seat. I opened my encrypted contacts list and dialed a number I hadn’t used since the Kabul extraction logistics project.
“I need the Bombardier Global 7500,” I said the moment the broker answered. “Tarmac in two hours. And send a fleet of black SUVs to the following twenty-five addresses.”
Constance had made a fatal error in her “aesthetic purge.” By uninviting everyone who didn’t fit her image of high society, she had alienated the people who actually held the family together. My Aunt Sarah, who made the best potato salad but wore thrift store coats. Uncle Mike, the mechanic with grease permanently etched under his nails. And Grandma Josephine, the matriarch Constance had shoved into a nursing home for “her own good,” claiming she was too frail to travel.
I sent a single, mass text to the reject list: Mom said there wasn’t enough room for you in Aspen. She lied. A car is outside your house right now. Pack for snow. We aren’t just going to dinner. We’re taking back the holiday.
I didn’t have to convince them. They were hurt, angry, and confused when the fleet of Escalades deposited them at the private hangar. Confusion turned to shock as they stood on the tarmac, staring at the seventy-five-million-dollar jet gleaming under the floodlights, clutching their Target suitcases.
“Briona?” Aunt Sarah whispered, walking up to me, her eyes wide. “Honey, did you… did you win the lottery?”
“Something like that,” I said, guiding Grandma Josephine up the stairs. “I work hard, Aunt Sarah. And it turns out the government pays better than Mom thinks.”
As we leveled out at forty-five thousand feet, the cabin was filled with the sound of crystal clinking and genuine laughter—a sound I hadn’t heard at a family gathering in years. My cousins were eating caviar like it was popcorn. Uncle Mike was reclining in a leather seat that cost more than his truck. For the first time, they weren’t the poor relations. They were the VIPs.
My phone vibrated on the armrest. It was Constance.
Venmo me $5,000 immediately. The rental requires a larger security deposit than I thought. And Brittany wants to book a spa day for the senator’s wife. Don’t ignore me, Briona. You owe us for raising you.
I looked at the message. Then I looked out the window at the curvature of the earth. She was down there, scrambling for petty cash to impress people who didn’t care about her, demanding money from the daughter she had banned from the trip. She thought she was squeezing me for a few more drops of utility.
She had no idea she was texting a woman cruising at Mach 0.9 in a flying palace.
I didn’t reply. I didn’t send the money. I swiped the notification away and picked up my glass of vintage Dom Pérignon.
“To family,” I said, raising my glass to the room.
“To family!” they roared back.
Below us, the snowy peaks of Colorado were getting closer. Constance was busy staging her perfect little life in a rental house she couldn’t afford. She didn’t know that the landlord was coming home, and I wasn’t knocking on the door.
