My Assistant Cried Rape And Named My Husband — But My Husband Is A Robot Chapter 02
Right after that, the detective queued up another feed—this one from the base of my apartment building.
The timestamp was frozen less than twenty minutes before Chloe called 911.
Under the amber wash of a streetlamp, a similarly tall man in a black hoodie yanked Chloe off the sidewalk and dragged her into a blind corner behind some shrubbery.
Chloe’s finger trembled as she pointed at the screen, crying and identifying him.
“That’s him! That’s the man!”
She whipped her head around, and the hatred in her eyes could have burned right through me.
“And you, Vivian! You were his accomplice!”
Chloe insisted the man who’d attacked her and the man who’d walked out of my building to take out the trash were one and the same.
The silhouettes in the two clips were, admittedly, eighty percent identical. And that patch of shrubs happened to be the exact blind spot in the surveillance coverage.
Half an hour later, Chloe came stumbling out of those bushes, her clothes torn into disarray, scratches and bruises already blooming clearly along her arms.
The detective turned the screen toward me.
“Recognize him, Ms. Lane?”
“Yes.”
Chloe cried out immediately:
“You finally admitted it! He’s the one who assaulted me! Vivian, you knew he was a pervert, and you deliberately lured me under your building!”
I looked at the familiar figure on the surveillance feed and didn’t rush to explain.
The detective pressed on. “What’s his name?”
“He doesn’t have one.”
“Social Security number?”
“None.”
Slam. The detective’s palm came down hard on the interrogation table.
“Ms. Lane! This is a police station, not a place for you to play word games!”
I raised my eyes slowly.
“Detective, I’m telling you the truth. The one who walked out of my apartment—isn’t a person.”
“Vivian, you cold-blooded snake!”
Chloe exploded:
“I knew there was a reason you kept playing saint, giving me free rides to and from work—you never had good intentions! You’re a pimp! A pervert’s pimp! Recruiting girls for that shady man of yours!”
A chill spread through me.
Chloe had just graduated. Her starting salary wasn’t much. The studio she rented was way out in the suburbs, more than an hour’s commute each way.
I’d genuinely felt for the girl—fresh out of school, life wasn’t easy on her—so if I was headed the same direction, I gave her a lift to and from work.
At the office, I looked out for her too, passing her plenty of easy, high-visibility projects.
I never imagined my kindness would drag me into a nightmare of this magnitude.
At that exact moment—
The door of the interrogation room banged open.
Several people who claimed to be Chloe’s family burst in and started cursing me out at the top of their lungs.
“You black-hearted piece of trash! Look what you did to my daughter!”
“My daughter just got engaged! Now it’s all been destroyed by you and that pervert of a husband!”
A middle-aged woman—Chloe’s mother, Diane Whitmore—was in tears and snot, lunging straight at me to yank my hair.
“I’m telling you right now, this doesn’t end here! A quarter of a million in damages—not a cent less! Otherwise we’ll picket outside Harrison Tech! We’ll make sure every soul in Silicon Valley knows what kind of woman you are! You’ll never work in this industry again!”
The detective stepped forward to hold them back, then swung a hard look at me:
“Vivian! Tell us the true identity of the man living with you—now!”
The interrogation room erupted. Cursing, wailing, screaming, all tangled together until my eardrums ached.
I let out a sigh and slowly raised my head.
“Fine. I’ll tell you. That thing isn’t a person.”
—