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 34 / 60

Chapter 34 - Fire on the Coast

Victoria squeezed the trigger.

I reacted instantly, diving to the left behind a server rack as a silenced shot chipped the wall where my head had been a second ago.

I rolled across the concrete floor, coming up on one knee, and fired two shots toward her position. Victoria ducked behind the central terminal, returning fire as sparks flew from the humming server units.

Behind her, the central monitor beeped loudly: 85%... 92%...

"You can't win, Audrey!" Victoria shouted over the hum of the cooling fans. "Even if that file broadcasts, my people hold assets in twenty countries! We will rebuild!"

"Not without your money, you won't!" I shouted back.

I pulled a second thumb drive from my pocket—the reverse-cyber weapon I had spent hours coding at the motel—and threw it like a dart into the secondary port on the console.

Instantly, a secondary script executed on the main screen: GLOBAL SLUSH FUNDS DRAINED. ASSETS TRANSFERRED TO FEDERAL SEIZURE ESCROW.

Victoria glanced at the screen and let out a horrified scream as she saw her multi-billion-dollar empire wiped to zero in real-time.

"You ruined me!" she shrieked, breaking cover and charging toward me with her gun raised.

I stepped out from behind the server rack, caught her wrist, twisted her arm upward, and drove my knee firmly into her chest. The gun clattered to the floor. I swept her legs out from under her, slamming her onto the cold concrete, and pressed the barrel of my gun against her temple.