Chapter 128
"What the hell is going on here?!" having heard the noise inside the storage room, Margaret barged in, a knife gleaming in her hands.
The Kales turned to look at her at once, their expressions both confused. and terrified.
"Fuck, woke up already," Margaret mumbled, a deep frown between her brows. She had hoped she still had some time before dealing with them, but now that they had regained consciousness...
"I guess we have no choice..." she spat, slowly eyeing the figures before her. "Let’s start with the weakest link."
With that, she grabbed Tommy by the collar of his shirt and dragged him out of the room, smirking as his parents did not try to interfere at all.
Shocked, Tommy tried to wriggle himself out of her grasp, but was far too weak for that. Then, adrenaline kicked in, and a sudden sense of clarity made him yell out unexpectedly, "Wait! Don’t hurt me! I have something important to tell you!"
Margaret paused, slowly turning her head to him, her lips stretched into a smirk. "Do you really think you can talk your way out of this?"
"My sister! Wendy! She has a spatial pocket! Or whatever! She is loaded! You must find her––she has everything! Suzy just told us! She’s been watching us from the camera in the corner! She saw everything!"
He finished in one breath, then watched Margaret nervously, studying every flicker of her expression.
Something like a storage space—he refused to believe she wouldn’t be tempted.
Not when it supposedly held a massive stockpile of supplies.
The impatience on Margaret’s face slowly faded, replaced by uncertainty... and then sharp suspicion.
"Storage space?" she murmured, her gaze narrowing. "You’re saying your sister has some kind of... supernatural ability to store things?"
"Yes—yes, exactly!" Tommy seized on the opening, nodding eagerly.
Margaret’s eyes darkened as she recalled the strange noises from earlier.
Her gaze drifted upward—settling on the surveillance camera in the corner of the ceiling.
The tiny red light blinked steadily.
Watching.
Always watching.
Someone had been monitoring them this entire time.
And according to Tommy, all of this information had come from that unseen observer—Suzy.
Margaret’s mind raced.
She remembered the despair and fury on George and Fiona’s faces when she had first walked in... the fragments of sound she’d overheard... their clear agitation.
Whoever was behind that camera had no intention of helping them.
So why reveal any of this at all?
Her eyes sharpened.
"The Suzy you’re talking about—why would she tell you any of this?"
Tommy answered quickly, "She doesn’t get along with our family! She’s just trying to disgust us—mess with my parents and me!"
Margaret’s voice turned colder. "And how do you know she’s telling the truth?"
Tommy froze.
His lips moved, but no words came out.
How did he know?
What proof did he have?
He had never seen Wendy use any kind of storage ability with his own eyes. He couldn’t exactly drag her here to demonstrate it.
Maybe Suzy was lying.
But his instincts screamed otherwise.
Wendy had to have a storage space.
Otherwise, where had all those supplies gone?
Margaret’s expression darkened further. "Are you playing me?"
"No—no! I’m not!" Tommy panicked, sweat breaking across his forehead as he scrambled for anything—anything—that might serve as evidence.
"Wait—I’ve got it!"
His eyes lit up suddenly.
"My sister bought a huge amount of supplies before! I even saw her inventory list—she spent hundreds of thousands! There’s no way all of that could just disappear—it must all be stored in her space!"
At the words hundreds of thousands in supplies, something flashed in Margaret’s eyes.
"Are you sure?" she asked, though her tone still carried doubt.
"I swear it’s true!" Tommy insisted. "And not long ago, she had truckloads of supplies delivered to our house—five full trucks!"
He leaned forward, urgency in his voice.
"That much food should last for years—how could it all be gone so quickly? She must have stored it in her space!"
With Suzy’s earlier "hint," his thoughts had finally begun to connect.
Those five trucks had been the reason the Kale family had always felt secure.
They had believed they were set for years.
And since Wendy had been managing the supplies, they never questioned it.
Margaret still looked unconvinced.
Tommy knew why.
Words alone weren’t enough.
He had no real proof.
His gaze darted around desperately—until it landed on George and Fiona.
"Dad! Mom! Say something!" he urged. "Didn’t my sister buy a ton of supplies? You saw the trucks too!"
George and Fiona both stiffened slightly.
Tommy pressed on urgently, his voice rising.
"Just tell her what you know—stop hiding it! My sister took all those supplies and abandoned us. You’re not still trying to protect her, are you? She took everything because she wanted us dead!"
He swallowed, then added bitterly,
"And Dad—you only slapped her once. Just one slap, and she turns around and destroys the whole family? And you still want to show her mercy? If it were me, I wouldn’t go that far over something like that!"
That struck a nerve.
Both George and Fiona froze.
"...Wendy... she really did buy a lot of things before," Fiona said suddenly, her voice hoarse but urgent.
It was as if she had grabbed onto the last thread of hope.
She had figured it out.
If her son had already said this much, then this might be their only chance to survive.
And besides, Wendy had been the one to show no mercy first.
She shouldn’t have taken everything. She shouldn’t have left without a word.
Even if they had been wrong... she could have stayed, tried to persuade them.
If she had just tried harder, they might have come around.
Margaret’s gaze shifted to her.
"Before everything started, Wendy brought a huge amount of supplies into the house—huge
," Fiona said, her words tumbling over each other. "So much that the storage room couldn’t even hold it!" She struggled to recall, her thoughts chaotic.
"I even wondered why she was buying so much... we didn’t have space for it. She said she was stockpiling, and I thought she was just being excessive. But if she has a storage space—then it all makes sense!"
"...There’s something else," George added, his voice low, a dark edge flickering in his eyes.
"She had me sign a warehouse lease once. Said it was for temporary storage—but I never saw any goods go in or out of that place. After that, she kept asking me for money. Bit by bit, I gave her over a million."
His jaw tightened.
"Looking back... she was planning this all along."
The supplies Wendy had stockpiled, they had been bought with his money.
And now she had taken everything and left them behind to die.
How could he accept that?
In his mind, those supplies belonged to him.
His precious daughter had been hiding such a massive secret, keeping it from him all this time.
All those years of favoritism... For nothing.
Anger and bitterness churned inside him—anger at losing the supplies, and a painful sense that his devotion had been misplaced.
Margaret listened, her eyes flickering with calculation.
With the Kales corroborating each other’s story, she was already more than halfway convinced.
And the more she thought about it, the more it made sense.
The villa itself was proof.
Wendy had been the one managing everything—its layout, its systems.
She had prepared in advance.
Generators, massive water storage tanks, filtration systems... While the rest of the city had plunged into darkness, this house still had power and water.
If Wendy had gone to such lengths... How could she not have stockpiled enormous amounts of supplies?
Whether or not the so-called "storage space" was real, one thing was certain: Wendy had resources.
A lot of them.
And that meant only one thing.
They had to find her.
Tommy noticed the shift in Margaret’s expression and seized the moment.
"Mrs... Mrs. Sanders, we’re victims too!" he said quickly. "And we told you all this—that counts for something, right? We’re making up for our mistakes!"
"Making up for it?" Margaret let out a cold laugh. "You think a few words are enough for me to forget everything and let you out of this storage room?"
Tommy’s face flushed dark red.
Fiona bit down hard on her lip, as if forcing herself to a decision.
"There’s... There’s something else," she said at last.