Chapter 2 - Shadows in the Blueprint
Arthur didn't storm the courtyard like a blind bull. Years of building a corporate empire taught him that raw fury was a weapon best used after the trap had been sprung. Instead, he forced his breathing to steady, turned on his heel, and walked back to his car. He popped the trunk, pulled out his secondary encrypted laptop, and connected directly to the estate's subterranean server room via a satellite uplink.
The screen flickered to life, streaming live footage from the east wing camera. Audio feeds captured every detail.
"Stay quiet, you little parasites," Elena’s voice hissed through the speaker, venom dripping from every syllable. "Your father is walking through those front doors any second now, and if I hear so much as a whimper from this doghouse, you won't see daylight until the weekend."
Arthur’s knuckles turned white as he watched Elena casually walk back toward the main entrance, smoothing her hair and pasting on her signature, adoring housewife smile.
The security system didn't just record the live feed; it automatically archived Elena’s digital footprint. Arthur tapped a few keys, pulling up the logs for the master camera override. It wasn't just a manual switch—it was a planned software bypass executed from a secondary tablet.
Elena’s tablet.
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She thought she had covered her tracks, but she had underestimated the deep-seated paranoia that came with being a billionaire in the tech sector. Arthur had coded the network architecture himself. Every override request created a mirrored backup in a cold-storage drive located three hundred feet underground, completely inaccessible from the house's local Wi-Fi.
He closed the laptop, a dark, dangerous resolve settling over his features. Elena wanted to play the wicked stepmother in a house of glass? He was going to give her front-row seats to her own demolition. But first, the children needed to come out of the cold.
