My husband walked into my hospital room after my near-fatal car accident—not to comfort me, but to demand that I get out of bed and stop costing him money. He tried to drag my broken body home until the door opened and he came face-to-face with the one man he never should have challenged: my father, a hidden special operations officer. / Chapter 22 / 60

Chapter 22 - The Shadow at the Workshop

The financial district server hub was concealed behind the glass facade of a defunct wealth management firm. By the time Elena’s tactical squad breached the front doors, the interior was bathed in the harsh red glow of emergency strobe lights.

"System purge initiated!" one of the federal tech agents shouted, frantically typing on a portable console. "We've got an automated wipe protocol running! It's erasing the hard drives right now!"

I stepped past the armed agents, pulled out the thumb drive attached to my father's watch, and jammed it directly into the master terminal.

"Hold your fire," I commanded. "The bypass script is running."

Lines of green code cascading down the main monitor froze. The wipe sequence halted at eighty-seven percent. On the screen, a single directory opened, displaying thousands of encrypted financial ledgers.

Elena stood beside me, staring at the screen in disbelief.

"These aren't Vance's old files," she murmured. "These are recent. Look at the timestamps—some of these transactions were made yesterday."

"Look at the shell company names," I said, pointing my finger at the screen. "Aegis Global. Vanguard Partners. Cerberus Trust. They aren't just remnants of Vance's old syndicate, Elena. Someone is using his old network to fund an entirely new operation."

Suddenly, the central monitor flickered black. A single line of text appeared in bold red font:

Welcome to the game, Ms. Hayes. Check your purse.

My blood ran cold. I reached into my leather tote bag and pulled out a small, heavy object that hadn't been there when I entered the park hours ago.

It was an unlabelled USB drive wrapped in a printed photograph.

I unwrapped the paper and turned it over. My throat seized. The photograph showed me sitting on the green wooden bench in the rose garden, taken from a high-angle sniper position through the trees.