My Father Locked Me Out In -10°c Snow Because Of A Dry Turkey. My Billionaire Grandmother Just Arrived With A Security Team. Who Is Freezing Now?
“You didn’t fail, Arya,”
Josephine said, her voice cutting through my self-pity like a scalpel.
“You attempted something difficult. They have never attempted anything. They just consume, and parasites always hate the host that tries to break free.”
Looting the Corpse
She tapped the screen on the center console.
A live feed appeared, connected to the security cameras inside the house.
The backup generator hadn’t kicked in yet.
I could see them in the living room, illuminated by the firelight and the glow of their phones.
They weren’t panicked.
They weren’t rushing to the window to see if I was freezing to death.
They were annoyed.
“Look at them,”
Josephine commanded.
“I watched inside the house.”
The mood had shifted from celebration to irritation.
Patricia was gesturing wildly, her silhouette sharp and jagged against the firelight.
I didn’t need audio to know what she was saying.
She was complaining about the inconvenience; the power outage was ruining her party aesthetic.
Then I saw Reese.
She was sitting on the sofa holding a silver-wrapped box—my box.
It was the one I had wrapped for myself, containing the last piece of technology I owned: a high-performance laptop I had salvaged from my company’s liquidation.
I had brought it to the living room intending to work after dinner.
She opened the lid.
Even in the grainy night vision of the security feed, I could see her smile.
She said something to Gregory, laughing.
He nodded, pouring another drink in the dark.
He wasn’t worried about his daughter in the snow.
He was letting his stepdaughter loot her corpse.
“She’s taking my laptop,”
I said, my voice flat.
“That has my code on it. My intellectual property.”
“She’s taking it because she believes you don’t exist anymore,”
Josephine said.
*”In their minds, you are already gone. Deleted.”
Execute Phase Two
“Patricia is probably telling her right now that you’re having a tantrum somewhere, that you ran off to teach them a lesson. She is gaslighting that girl into believing your suffering is a performance.”
I watched Gregory raise his glass again.
He looked comfortable.
He looked like a man who believed he owned the world and everyone in it.
“He thinks the darkness is just a power outage,”
I said.
“He thinks he is the only one who can turn the lights off.”
“He is about to learn that he doesn’t even own the switch,”
Josephine corrected.
She picked up a sleek black phone from the console.
She didn’t dial; she just spoke a single command into it.
“Execute phase 2. Enter the premises.”
The car doors locked with a heavy mechanical thud.
Outside, the two security agents who had retrieved me started walking toward the front door.
They didn’t look like guests.
They moved like a foreclosure.
“Ready?”
Josephine asked, finally looking at me.
Her eyes were hard, but there was something else there, too: an invitation.
“I don’t have anything,”
I said, looking down at my borrowed coat.
“I don’t have my keys. I don’t have my money. They have everything.”
Josephine smiled, a terrifying, razor-thin expression.
“You have the deed, Arya. You just don’t know it yet. Let’s go introduce your father to his landlord.”
The Master of the House
The front door didn’t open; it yielded.
My grandmother didn’t knock.
She simply walked through the entrance of the estate as if the locks recognized their true master and dissolved.
The blizzard rushed in behind her, a vortex of snow and wind that swirled across the marble foyer, killing the warmth of the fireplace in seconds.
I followed two steps behind, flanked by the security team.
I felt like a ghost returning to haunt the living.
My coat was heavy, and my body was still thawing, but my mind was razor sharp.
I watched the scene unfold like a slow-motion car crash.
The living room was a tableau of interrupted greed.
The backup generator had finally kicked in, bathing the room in a harsh, emergency yellow light.
Gregory was mid-laugh, a crystal tumbler of scotch raised in a toast.
Patricia was admiring a diamond bracelet on her wrist.
Reese was typing on my laptop.
They froze.
The silence wasn’t just quiet; it was heavy.
It was the sound of oxygen being sucked out of a room before an explosion.
“Mother?”
Gregory’s voice cracked.
He lowered his glass, the liquid sloshing over the rim onto the Persian rug.
He blinked, trying to reassemble his reality.
“We… we didn’t expect you. The roads are closed.”
The Clinical Detachment
Josephine didn’t look at him.
She walked into the center of the room, her heels clicking against the hardwood like a gavel striking a bench.
She didn’t remove her coat.
She didn’t smile.
She looked at the holiday decorations, the pile of gifts, and the food on the table with the clinical detachment of a health inspector shutting down a contaminated restaurant.
“Turn off the music,”
she said.
“It wasn’t a request.”
Reese scrambled for the remote, her eyes wide.
The Christmas jazz died instantly.
Gregory stepped forward, putting on the mask he wore for investors and creditors: the charming, misunderstood patriarch.
“Josephine, really, you gave us a start. We were just having a quiet family evening. Patricia, get my mother a drink. She must be freezing.”
“I am not cold, Gregory,”
Josephine said, her voice cutting through his performance.
“But Arya was.”
She stepped aside, revealing me standing in the hallway.
I saw the color drain from Patricia’s face.
Reese pulled my laptop onto her lap, trying to hide it with a throw pillow.
The Victim Narrative
Gregory didn’t look ashamed.
He looked annoyed, like a magician whose trick had been revealed by a heckler.
“Arya,”
he sighed, shaking his head with mock disappointment.
“I see you went running to your grandmother. Always the victim, aren’t you?”
“I told you, Mother, she was having a tantrum. She stormed out because I offered her some constructive criticism on her business. I was just about to go look for her.”
“You were pouring a scotch,”
I said.
My voice was raspy from the cold but steady.
“And you locked the deadbolt.”
“Details,”
Gregory waved a hand dismissively.
“It’s a drafty house. We were protecting the pipes.”
Josephine turned to the man standing beside her.
I hadn’t noticed him in the limo, but he had entered with the silence of a shadow.
He was wearing a suit that cost more than a midsize sedan and holding a leather briefcase.
“Mr. Vance, the family’s shark, is the timeline established?”
Josephine asked him.
“Yes, Madam,”
Vance replied.
“We have the security logs from the gate, the thermal imaging from the car, and the timestamp of the lockout. Forty-five minutes of exposure, at least. In most jurisdictions, that is attempted manslaughter. In this family, we call it a breach of contract.”
