The Last Vitamin

The padel court echoed with the rhythmic thwack of rubber against ball, a sound that had become the soundtrack to Elena's Tuesday evenings with Marcus. She watched him from the bench, sweat glistening on his forehead, his iPhone vibrating insistently on the sideline table. Again.

'Work?' she asked when he joined her for water.

'Always.' He smiled, but his eyes darted to the glowing screen. 'Corporate's riding me about the merger.' He popped a vitamin D supplement—his third that day. 'Gotta keep the immune system up for battle.'

Elena nodded, though something had shifted between them lately. The distance wasn't physical; it was the way he guarded his phone like a state secret, the way his 'vitamins' had multiplied from one a day to handfuls.

That night, after Marcus fell into a deep sleep, Elena did something she'd never done before. She reached for his iPhone. Her thumb hovered over the face recognition—she knew his passcode, had used it a hundred times to set alarms or take pictures.

What she found wasn't an affair.

It was worse.

Messages with timestamps stretching back months. Coordinates. Photos of her in her own home. Notes about her habits, her friends, her conversations. And finally, a name: 'Corporate Security Asset #7429.'

The vitamin bottle on his nightstand caught the moonlight. She'd teased him about his obsessive supplementation, how he was preparing for some imaginary apocalypse.

She scrolled back to the first message: 'Target confirmed. Subject works for pharmaceutical competitor. Obtain R&D timeline on new vitamin supplement line. Asset should initiate relationship protocol.'

The padel games. The dinners. The intimacy he'd faked with such precision.

Elena placed the phone exactly where she'd found it. She packed her bag quietly, her movements practiced and methodical. She left everything else—her toothbrush, the clothes she'd left there, the life they'd built on a foundation of surveillance and lies.

The vitamin bottle sat on the nightstand, innocent and white. She almost took it, almost left him with nothing but the realization that in the end, he was the one who'd been played.

Instead, she left one pill on his pillow. A different color, one she'd brought from her own company's lab—experimental, unapproved, a prototype that would show up in any drug test as something unmistakably foreign.

Let him wonder. Let him spend the rest of his life checking every supplement, every glass of water, every kiss for poison.

Some vitamins, she thought as she closed the door forever, you have to earn the hard way.