Chapter 6 - Shadows on the Horizon
Two weeks after the dust settled, life at Sterling Point Capital returned to a fierce, unrelenting rhythm of high-stakes investments and tech acquisitions. The attempted sabotage had only served to prove our security infrastructure was virtually impenetrable, driving our valuation up by nearly twenty percent.
I was working late in my office, the city lights shimmering like diamonds against the dark glass, when my secure terminal chimed with an encrypted incoming transmission.
Normally, internal communications came through our corporate Slack channel or secure email servers. This ping came through an independent, military-grade PGP-encrypted relay—a channel I hadn't used since my days consulting on cyber defense architecture prior to my venture capital career.
I frowned, typing my master decryption key into the terminal.
A single line of text materialized on the screen:
“The game isn't over, Olivia. Brandon was just a pawn on a much larger board. If you want to know who really funded Julian Vance’s syndicate, check the transaction records of Apex Global Holdings from five years ago—right before you met your ex-husband.”
My breath hitched.
Apex Global Holdings.
That was the multinational conglomerate my father’s former business partner had mysteriously liquidated right before my father’s sudden, fatal stroke. A stroke the coroner had ruled natural, but one I had privately questioned for years.
Before I could trace the IP address of the transmission, the terminal screen flashed red, wiping the message logs clean in an automated self-destruct protocol.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
Brandon hadn't just stumbled into a white-collar crime ring by accident. His marriage to me wasn't a random romance born at a charity gala five years ago.
It had been an engineered infiltration.
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Someone had placed Brandon in my path. Someone needed access to my father’s encrypted estate archives, which I had inherited and locked away inside Sterling Point’s deepest secure servers.
And whoever pulled those strings was still out there in the dark, watching my every move.
