Cassie read and then re-read her friend’s text multiple times. Was Isabel actually serious about coming to meet her at work? She tried calling Isabel but it went straight to the factory default voicemail. Anyone with access to the internet could find Tech Town’s address but Cassie didn’t know the company’s policy about visitors. The only person that had dropped by at the office was Sapphire and even she had done that through unconventional means as she had run past Annalisa at the reception to get to Felix’s office. Would she have to meet Isabel at the reception or outside the company’s doors? Or would she be allowed to see her friend with the confines of Felix’s office?
She was pulled out of her contemplation when the office phone on Felix’s desk began to ring. It was probably the first time since Felix had left that the phone had rung so thinking it was him, she dashed over and picked up the receiver.“Good morning. You have reached the office of Felix Callahan.To Isabel’s credit, she didn’t immediately yank her hand away from Daniel’s grasp after he had kissed it. She stared at him even after the elevator’s doors slid open at his floor and he stared back at her, still enthralled by her very presence.“Well, I guess this is goodbye.” Daniel said as he stepped out of the elevator. “Isabel, I hope to see you again sometime.”Isabel stared blankly at him so Cassie nudged her so she could give a response. All the same, she opened her mouth to give him a reply but nothing came out of it. In the end, the elevator’s doors closed and the two friends continued their journey upstairs without Isabel saying anything to Daniel. Immediately the doors closed, Cassie burst into a bout of hysterical laughter.“It’s not funny.” Isabel hissed.“Oh, I beg to differ. It was funny.” Cassie said, as she struggled to stop laughing. “He was absolutely smitten by you.”“He’ll forget all about ever meeting me by the end o
Both Cassie and Isabel turned around suddenly at the sound of the voice, with Cassie spinning around so abruptly that she accidentally knocked over the bottle of vinegar.“Shit!” She hissed, as she scrambled to prop the bottle back to an upright position. By the time the bottle was upstanding again, more than half of its contents had already spilled on the ground. She then started to soak up the spilt vinegar with her napkin before it spread any further and possibly ruined the flooring.“You shouldn’t swear.” Bethany cautioned hypocritically. “It’s absolutely unladylike.”Isabel raised a brow and Cassie had to bite her tongue to prevent herself from reminding Bethany of how often she swore. If swearing was a feature that made someone ‘absolutely unladylike’, then Bethany was undoubtedly, the least ladylike woman Cassie knew. Hadn’t she been the one that had said ‘fuck’ just a few seconds ago?The napkin that Cassie had been using to wipe the spilt
By the end of the week, Cassie was tired to her very core. On Tuesday night, after she had been forced to give Bethany a mani-pedi and run to a store so she could make her a fruit salad from scratch, she had thought that had been the best she had ever been. She had been dead wrong. For the last two days of the week, Bethany had managed to send Cassie on much more tasking chores than she had sent her on all week long.That Friday, Bethany had come to work dressed in an auburn cashmere sweater dress and knee high boots. She had handed Cassie a crumpled paper that had a long list of chores she wanted Cassie to complete typed out on both sides of the paper! Bethany had made Cassie drop off and pick up her laundry. She had ordered her to clean the inside of her car and Cassie had been thoroughly disgusted when she had found two used condoms in the backseat. Cassie had booked Bethany an appointment at a spa for a Hollywood bikini wax and then another appointment at her OBGYN. Cassie didn’t
“Narcissistic fuck.” Felix muttered after the sound of Luther’s door slamming shut reverberated throughout the hallway. He turned to his PA. “Are you okay, Cassie?”Cassie didn’t look at him. All her attention was on her hand that Luther had grabbed. Just from seeing him, she could tell that he was relatively fit but that factor had somehow slipped her mind after she had caught him having sex with Emerald as her subconscious had labeled him otherwise. Besides, she recalled her first day on the job when Felix had to restrain Luther and had made it look so easy and effortless. Those two incidents had caused her to think that Luther was nothing but a weak and perverted old man. The ache in her hand told a different story. “I’m fine.”Felix rolled his eyes at her words. “No, you’re not. You’re bleeding.”At first, Cassie thought that she had heard him incorrectly. She would know if she was bleeding from her hand and besides, there was no way Luther had held her hard enough to draw blood.
Considering that she had injured her leg, Felix hadn’t expected Cassie to show up to work the following Monday. He hadn’t said anything about giving her a couple of days off due to her injury but he had expected her to be absent from work for at least a week. He was quite surprised when Cassie shuffled into his office on Monday morning, a fresh bandage wrapped around her leg and a cup of black coffee in her hand for him. He accepted it without a word and went back to work. After Cassie handed Felix his cup of coffee, she shuffled to her table and booted her computer. As usual, Felix had neglected to thank her when she brought him a cup of coffee. She guessed that he had forgotten his magic words over the weekend and that apologizing to her was nothing but a once in a blue moon event. Cassie found herself a lot less bothered about his lack of a ‘thank you’, than she initially was. She attributed it to the fact that whenever she came back from getting Bethany’s ridiculously complicated
It wasn’t until Friday that Cassie had to leave the office for something other than getting lunch for herself and Felix. All throughout the week, her schedule had fallen back into the same rhythm before the arrival of Bethany. By the time she got to work, Felix would have already been seated behind his desk working. After Cassie handed Felix his cup of coffee, she would then turn her attention to her own computer until it was lunch time and leave the office to get lunch for herself and Felix. Although they both had lunch in the same space, none of them would ever call what they did having lunch together as they both sat at their respective tables wordlessly nibbling at their food. After her lunch, Cassie would go back to her computer until it was time to go home.Often, Cassie wondered what time Felix got to and left work but she daren’t voice her questions to him. He might not have been as horrible as his mother but there was a professional gap between them and Cassie didn’t think it
“I don’t care what you have to say to me.” Felix snapped. How had she even gotten into the building? Didn’t the guys at security downstairs have enough sense to know that he wouldn’t want her in the building? The list of people that were going to be left unemployed at the end of the day suddenly grew longer. “You left work in the middle of the day without telling anyone about it. And now, you think that you can just strut in here and demand that I let you keep your job? The kind of behavior that you displayed this afternoon was highly unprofessional and frankly, I expected better from you.”“I’m not asking you to let me keep my job, I’m just asking that you hear my side of the story.” She pleaded. The moment she had run out of Tech Town, she knew that any chances of getting her job back had flown out of the window. She knew that Felix would not think twice about firing her. She had gone back to Tech Town for two reasons: she needed to collect the stuff she had left behind i
Cassie stared at Felix in utter disbelief. She had been expecting a lot of things from him like yelling, glaring, cursing and possibly some scolding. She had already been scolded and glared at but Felix was yet to yell or curse. Even when he had been scolding her, his tone had been even, disappointed, seemingly indifferent and free from swear words. It had been Luther who Felix had yelled at and cursed. The fact that he had asked to hear what had happened was completely out of character for him.“Did you hear what I said?” Felix asked. She had been staring at him without saying anything for more than a minute. Had she gone into shock due to whatever had happened earlier that day or had she not heard what he said? “Are you okay?”“Yeah. Sorry.” Cassie said, shaking her head to get herself out of a trance. “It’s just…” She trailed off wondering whether she should tell Felix exactly what she had been thinking. She decided to go for it. She was most likely going to never see Felix again,
"Good morning. I’m Dorothea Sinclair and welcome to today’s session of Under the Spotlight. I am sure that some of you are wondering where I am today and why this background looks different. That’s because, for this interview, I left the studio to conduct this interview in the home of our guest who is no stranger to the spotlight.” Dorothea announced. “Some of you might know her from September last year when she and her best friend, Isabel Gomez, were held hostage by two gunmen who kidnapped them from the club they both worked in. Some of you might also know her from her interview with me on this very show in March where we talked about her revolutionary app, Care Compass which was, and still is, making waves in the medical field. However, some of you might know her from everything that went down two months ago when she was kidnapped from a supermarket and held hostage for a week. Join me to welcome, the very beautiful and very intelligent, Cassie Peters.” She said and signaled to th
The first time Cassie had woken up as a captive, she had thought that that would be the most pain she would ever be in. She remembered how much her head hurt and how she had ached all over. Waking up again, she found that she felt a thousand times worse. She owed the shitty feeling in her entire body to Robert fucking Smith. After she had been caught trying to escape, he dragged her by her hair to the very room that she had escaped from. She had tried to struggle against him but her muscles ached from running around the house and anytime she made any form of movement against him, Robert would pause along the hallway to deliver a series of kicks to her midriff.When they had finally got to the room, he had exerted the second phase of his revenge by reopening the cuts that had been made on her arm earlier that week and adding a couple of new ones with the help of his switchblade. He followed it by wrapping his gangly fingers around her neck and choking her, letting his nails dig into he
When Felix finally awoke, he did so slowly, his vision blurry and his head heavy. Even as he was still half unconscious, he realized that he recognized the environment that he was in. It was all strangely familiar but yet, unsettlingly transformed. He was in a room in the Callahan mansion and judging from the size and layout of the room, he was in his old bedroom. The decor of the room had changed drastically since the last time he had been in the room. All of the posters of superheroes and bands had been taken down and replaced with modern art pieces. The color of the walls had been changed from a baby blue color to a dark gray one. His bedside table which had been formerly crowded with action figures and school books now spotted manila folders, stationery and a small potted cacti.The more Felix observed the room, the more it looked to him like someone had been staying there for a while. The hardwood floors had a few scuff marks on them at the points where the room’s furniture was.
Felix stumbled over the phone as he clumsily tried to pick up the phone. “Cassie. Are you hurt? Do you know where you are?” Felix asked, each word tumbling out of his mouth quicker than a response could possibly be given.He pulled his laptop closer to himself and hurriedly started to launch the software that he had been working on ever since the night of Cassie’s disappearance. He had already set his phone so that whenever Cassie's phone came online, he would be able to track it. It had a lot of flaws but it was the best he could come up with in such short time. He couldn’t just download a regular cell phone locator off the internet to locate Cassie’s phone as she had built a series of safeguards for her phone to ensure that it was heavily guarded. She had everything on it apart from a proper password; it was both ironic and amusing. He had tried launching the app multiple times but the search always came up blank, indicating that her phone had been switched off. Now, it showed that
She startled herself awake the next morning. There was no way for her to tell if anyone had entered the room while she was asleep. As she pulled herself from the ground, she decided that anytime she was going to fall asleep, she would do so with her back to the door so that if anyone were to try to enter the room, she would know. Throughout the entire day, she anxiously waited for someone to open the door but no one did. By the time it was evening, she got into the shower and had her bath again, this time putting on her clean and dry underwear, washing her dress and then hanging it close to the radiator so that it would dry faster. It was already dark out when the dress was dry enough for her to wear and when she left the bathroom, she found another cup of ramen and a bottle of water.She had started to worry that there was a camera in the room that Robert used to determine when she was in the bathroom to come and drop her food. Before she could think about it too much, she realized t
By Cassie’s calculations, she had been Robert’s captive for six days.When she had realized that it had been him that had taken her, she had had a lot of questions, some of which she hadn’t been able to answer. Since when had he gotten out of prison? Was he working in conjunction with Big Daddy? Had he also been a part of her house being set on fire and Isabel getting shot? Would he also be going after Felix and the twins later? Where exactly was this house that he had taken her to?She still found it bizarre that he had had a hand in her kidnapping as she had forgotten all about him after she and Isabel had testified against him in court. She chided herself for not seeing it coming. His exact words to her as they had carted him into the squad car on the day of his arrest had been: I’ll get you for this you stupid bitch! That day, she had thought that his words were just an empty threat of a mad man; she had never expected him to make good on it.Judging by the fact that it had been d
In the week that Cassie had been gone, Felix had felt as if his heart had been violently ripped out from his chest, severely stomped on and then set aflame. When he had gotten home that dark and gloomy Saturday night, he had called Amanda and Isabel to inform them of what had happened. They had both in their own way panicked, but had still managed to assure him that Cassie was fine and would turn up before the next morning. Amanda had volunteered to keep the twins until the next morning so that they wouldn’t bombard him with questions about the whereabouts of their sister. In the end, Felix had had to find a way to break it to them as Cassie had still been missing by the next morning. There had been a lot of tears and visible confusion and it had taken him ages but he had finally managed to calm them down.When he had met with police officers later that week to try to figure out what had happened that night, he found that although they managed to garner some information, it was mostly
Cassie felt as if her head had been shattered into thousands of pieces by a sledgehammer, hastily put back together with hot glue and then a band of tiny people had started to use it as a venue for a rock metal concert. She felt worse than that time in her freshman year of uni when she had attended a series of parties nonstop for an entire week, drinking everything that was handed to her and dancing to every song that the DJ had played. The thing was, this time, she hadn’t been partying. In fact, she had just been… What exactly had she been doing?Cassie tried hard to recall what she had been doing before, straining her brain and ignoring the headache that intensified in her attempt to remember. Her memory came back to her in slow flashes. Riding the Ferris wheel with Felix. Being presented with a stuffed bear. Running in the rain and seeking shelter in a supermarket. Felix let go of her hand so that she could go and get a carton of milk. Try as much as she might, that was where her m
Felix steadied himself against a nearby shelf as he took quick, successive breaths. Cassie was fine. She had to be fine. He started to circle the supermarket again, searching for her amongst the multitude of shoppers. When he didn’t see her, he did it a third time. And then a fourth time. But there was still no sign of Cassie anywhere. If it were Eliza that had disappeared, his first instinct would have been that she was trying to play a cruel prank on him. But Cassie didn’t play pranks. And if she was playing one at the moment by hiding from him, she would have popped out sometime during his first search around the supermarket.He headed back to the check-out section, cutting into the queue and ignoring the people on it who complained and cursed as he shoved past them to get to the front of the line. “Have you seen my girlfriend?”Emily looked at him stunned. “No. You came to the counter without her. I remember that you mentioned her, but I never saw her. Is everything okay?” She ask