I Served 12 Years In Black Ops Only To Find My Brother Stole My $6.8m Home. He Declared Me Dead And Forced Our 78-year-old Mom To Be His Maid. Now, The Real Mission Begins.

“And make me a new one. Actually hot this time, not lukewarm like the swill you usually serve.”

My mother got on her hands and knees and picked up the broken pieces, her fingers bleeding from the sharp edges. I watched Daniel host another party, smaller this time, just a dozen friends. Someone made a joke about the help and asked where Daniel found her.

He laughed and said:

“Believe it or not, she came with the house. Previous owner’s mother or something. I kept her on out of charity. She’s slow, but she works cheap.”

Previous owner. As if I had never existed. As if I were just some stranger who used to live there.

I watched my mother serve them dinner, a meal she’d spent six hours preparing. Not one person thanked her. When she tripped and spilled wine on the tablecloth, Daniel erupted.

He grabbed her arm so hard she cried out and he shoved her toward the kitchen.

“You stupid old woman! That’s Italian linen! Do you have any idea what that costs? It comes out of your food budget!”

Food budget. I later learned that Daniel gave her $40 a week for food. $40 in one of the most expensive cities in America.

She was eating rice and canned beans while they gorged on Japanese Wagyu and French wine. The moment that made me nearly break cover came on the third night of surveillance. I watched Jessica come downstairs to the basement, drunk from whatever expensive cocktail she’d been nursing all evening.

She stood in the doorway of my mother’s room.

“You know what I think, Emma?”

Jessica said, her words slurred.

“I think you’re faking it. I think you remember everything. I think you’re playing up this dementia act to get sympathy.”

My mother, sitting on her bed in her nightgown, looked up with confused eyes.

“I’m sorry, Jessica, I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you dare call me Jessica! It’s Mrs. Reed to you!”

Jessica walked closer.

“Daniel is too soft on you. He lets you live here rent-free, gives you food, gives you work so you have something to do with your pathetic life. And how do you repay us? By making mistakes. By embarrassing us in front of our friends!”

“I try my best,”

my mother whispered.

“I’m sorry if I’m not good enough.”

“You’re not good enough. You’ll never be good enough.”

Jessica looked around the bare room with disgust.

“This is better than you deserve, you know. Daniel wanted to put you in a state home, one of those places where they park old people and forget about them. But I convinced him to keep you here. So show some gratitude!”

My mother nodded, tears streaming down her face.

“Thank you, Mrs. Reed. Thank you for your kindness.”

Jessica laughed, cold and sharp.

“Kindness? That’s rich.”

She turned to leave then stopped.

“Oh, and Emma, if you ever mention Michael again, if you ever talk about your dead son to anyone, I’ll make sure Daniel follows through on that nursing home threat. Understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good.”

Jessica climbed the stairs and slammed the door. I heard the lock click. They were locking her in at night.

I sat in my rental car, shaking with rage so intense I thought I might black out. I had killed men for less than what I just witnessed. I had ended lives for following orders that did less damage than what my brother was doing to our mother every single day.

But I forced myself to breathe, to think tactically, and to remember that the mission wasn’t complete. I still needed more. I needed the financial evidence.

I needed to understand the full scope of the fraud. My phone buzzed. It was a message from my contact at the agency: three encrypted files.

I downloaded them and started reading. The first file was Daniel’s bank records. I traced the $10 million insurance payout.

He’d put $2 million into a legitimate investment account, probably to avoid suspicion. The rest had been laundered through a series of shell companies. Luxury cars were purchased and immediately sold.

Art was bought at inflated prices from galleries that existed only on paper. Real estate flips that never actually happened. $5 million had been converted to gold and stored in a private vault in Las Vegas.

$2 million had been spent on his lifestyle: cars, trips to Europe, and memberships at exclusive clubs. The remaining million had simply vanished into cryptocurrency wallets I’d need a supercomputer to track. The second file was property records.

Daniel had been busy. He transferred the La Jolla house to an LLC he controlled. He’d used my mother’s identity to take out a reverse mortgage on her childhood home in Oregon, then pocketed the money and let the bank foreclose.

He’d opened credit cards in her name and maxed them out. Her credit score was destroyed; she would never be able to rent an apartment or get a loan. The third file was medical records.

I read through Dr. Kelly’s notes with growing horror. The dementia diagnosis was fabricated, based on a single appointment where Daniel had accompanied my mother and answered all the questions for her.

“Patient demonstrates confusion and memory loss,”

the report said.

“Unable to recall basic information without assistance from family member.”

It was a setup. Daniel had coached her, probably threatened her, and definitely manipulated the situation to get a diagnosis that would let him take control of her affairs. But there was more.