Mistakenly Eaten

25. Bring The Madness to An End

“I am trying to make a flat pan sizzling salmon with tropical toppings and a zesty touch to it.” Althea spoke, looking at the camera at once and then working down at her station, flipping the salmon carefully and articulately preparing a new and outstanding dish.

Nicholas’s mouth was hung open with sheer shock, as he went through all the videos on the cameras, that he found hidden in the pantry.

He found videos, some cut and edited and some raw, of Martha and Anthony, pretended to be what he could only assume to be judges and tasting different dishes.

In some of the unedited videos, he saw them crying and throwing up, after tasting some dishes, whilst in the edited videos, they were shown giving opinions on the foods that they tasted.

Everything was done in a perfect manner, set up in an amusingly characterized way, to give the impression that they were a part of the cooking competition and Althea was definitely in the center of the entire drama.

So far, he was able to calculate certain stances, as such as the fact that Althea was basically the cook who had been cooking all the meals that Nicholas had been eating.

It was her food that had actually appeased to his appetite.

He had refused to eat anything at all and then one day, the moment the pasta that looked similar to the one in Gragnano, was presented right in front of him, something clicked inside his mind.

The fact that they had made Althea believe that she was part of a cooking competition and had her cooked dishes for Nicholas to eat, which meant that they were playing charades in front of her. they were fooling her to believe that they were the organizers of the cooking competition.

Nicholas scratched the back of his head, wondering why would they had to go to such lengths, only get a cook.

Her food was delicious and there was no doubt in that but he only wondered why was everyone putting up such a big show. They could have just asked her to be a chef or work at the island.

This proposed the idea in Nicholas’s mind that the girl was not willing to perhaps work at the island.

He then scrolled through a bunch of other videos and found out Althea’s entire name, which spoken a bunch of times on camera, before she was shown working with a dish.

Each dish that she ever made and that Nicholas ever ate, was created with much intricacy and much care.

Nicholas noticed that the girl had a kin for cooking.

The way she handled everything when she prepared food, looked like she was conducting an open heart surgery. That’s why whatever she prepared seemed like freshly popped out of heaven and tasted so delicious.

But he was still confused about why the girl was being lied to and why Salva, Serena and everyone, including his uncle and aunt, were working so hard just to keep the girl in their house and to have her cook.

Of course, doing it for Nicholas was one point but to go to the lengths of making her believe that she was part of some cooking competition was another level of confusion that Nicholas was not able to cross.

Nicholas continued going through the videos and stopped at once, when he saw an entire video of a cook off episode edited in a way to make it look like it was an official video.

In the very beginning of the video, a title appeared that stated, Secret Chef Hunters’ Society Presents to you – their annual cooking competition.

Nicholas c****d an eyebrow reading that title.

He immediately took his phone out, that operated on a specialized satellite network, that he had designed and built specifically to work only on the island.

He typed in the title on google and he was only in the middle of writing the title when the entire name of ‘Secret Chef Hunters’ Society’ appeared in front of him.

He clicked on it and opened up the first link on the page that appeared and he was directed towards the Society’s official page. He searched on the website for a bit and went through it step by step, studying the entire society and realizing what they were.

He then looked back at the cameras, realizing that the entire household, including all the workers and helpers were pretending to be a part of the society and fake shooting an entire cook off competition, just to make Althea believe that she was selected in that society.

He sensed that Althea must be an aspirant of that society and that’s how they ended up luring her to the island, because the real society also conducted their competition on an island.

Not only what the entire house was doing was illegal but also risking something big by orchestrating an entire lie and actually recording through their own lies. If Althea was to find out the truth, she could not only press legal charges but also have Nicholas’s entire reputation go down the drain.

He threw the cameras back where he had them picked up from and stormed out of the pantry and in to his office, where he paced back and forth like a bull, puffing in anger and realizing what Salva and everyone was doing was extremely stupid and risky.

He understood that they might have done everything only to make Althea cook for him and he did enjoy the food and somehow his body also didn’t rejected or vomited the food out but it still wasn’t a sensible thing to do what they all did.

They risked their entire lives and lied to a girl, who had high chances and probability of finding out the truth and once if that happened, there could be many risk factors that could led to multiple cases, charges, arrest and also risk to the Santiago name.

Nicholas was obviously flabbergasted and angered over what everyone had ended up doing but he also understood that everyone put up such a huge risk and even Gigi, who was the most carefully treading person that he had ever known, also got involved. Which only proved one thing to Nicholas, that his condition was actually quite serious. His depression was quite obvious and his body refusing to consume anything at all, was actually quite obvious to everyone that had made them succumb to applying the propaganda of making Althea believe that she was there for some competition.

But he wondered if they couldn’t make her agree to come and just simply work with them as a chef.

He was still a bit confused, when he heard certain footsteps down the hallway.

He looked up at the clock and saw that it was around eight in the evening and he usually heard many murmurs down the hallway. Remembering the time on the camera’s screens he sensed that the dinner’s fake cook off began at around eight which meant that Althea and everyone had began gathering in the kitchen to prepare dinner for him.

His stomach gurgled and churned with hunger, just at the mere thought of Althea preparing yet another tasteful dish for him, but at the same time, a very sensible and more rigid part of him told him that he needed to end the madness and bring light to the truth.

With that determination, he opened up the door to his office and sighed, walking towards the kitchen to end the entire series of wackiness and wicked games that Salva and everyone around the house had built up.

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