Part 2
"Don't bother unpacking your bags into the dressing room," Don Baste ordered from his motorized wheelchair, pointing a thick finger toward a small loveseat in the corner of the massive bedroom. "You’ll sleep on the sofa. I’m too big; you wouldn't be comfortable in the bed."
I nodded quietly, still wearing my wedding dress. "Whatever makes you comfortable, Don Baste. Do you need help transferring into bed?"
He glared at me from under his heavy, scarred brow, a cruel smirk twisting his lips. "Not yet. Take off that expensive dress first. Then bring a basin of warm water, wash my feet before bed, and feed me my dinner. If my father-in-law paid off a $3.5 million debt with you, I intend to get my money’s worth out of my new maid."
What I didn't know that night was that Don Baste was testing me.
For the next eleven months, he did everything humanly possible to make me snap. He pretended to be lazy, slovenly, crude, and insufferably bossy. He would ring a silver bell at 3:00 AM demanding freshly squeezed orange juice, spill soup across the Persian rugs just to watch me scrub it on my hands and knees, and bark orders at me whenever the estate staff was watching.
He was waiting for the mask to slip. He wanted to see how long "sweet little Clara" would last before the greed, the screaming, or the revulsion finally showed on her face.
Except I never snapped.
Growing up with a narcissistic father and stepmother had taught me patience, and my nursing training had taught me empathy. Every night, I knelt on the floor with a warm towel and lavender soap, gently washing his feet without a single complaint. Whenever he insulted my cooking, I calmly made him something else. And when my father and stepsister showed up at the mansion gates three months into our marriage demanding that Baste give them a $500,000 "family allowance," I went out to the security gate myself and told them to leave my husband alone.
Unknown to me, Baste was watching every single move I made.
Around month nine, while I was organizing the linen closet, I started noticing strange things around the penthouse suite that didn't add up.
First, for a man who supposedly weighed 300 pounds and ate pasta and steak all day, the food he "dropped" or sent back to the kitchen was almost everything on his plate—and whenever I took the trash out from his private study, I found empty wrappers for high-protein athletic supplements and electrolyte packets.
Second, whenever I washed his feet at night, I noticed his ankles weren't swollen like a morbidly obese person’s should be. In fact, his calves beneath his sweatpants were rock-solid muscle, and he never let me roll his pant legs above his ankles.
Then came the night of our one-year wedding anniversary.
That afternoon, my father, my stepmother Lydia, and Baste’s treacherous cousin Victor—who was the Vice President of Montemayor Holdings—had all been invited to the mansion for an anniversary dinner the following evening. At midnight, Baste barked at me to go to sleep on the sofa and locked himself inside his private bathroom.
At 2:00 AM, I woke up thirsty. I looked over at the king-sized bed. It was empty.
Then I looked at the corner by the bathroom door. Baste’s motorized wheelchair was sitting right there in the bedroom—completely empty.
"Don Baste?" I whispered, rushing over to the bathroom door, terrified he had tried to walk by himself and fallen on the marble floor.
The heavy door was cracked open an inch. I pushed it open—and the scream tore out of my throat before I could stop it.
Standing in front of the vanity mirror was a six-foot-three man with broad, sculpted shoulders, a razor-sharp jawline, six-pack abs, and wet dark hair. And resting in the marble sink right in front of him was a military-grade prosthetic fat-suit and a hyper-realistic silicone neck mask—the "skin" of the Pig Millionaire.
