Chapter 4 - THE DOOMSDAY PROTOCOL"No!" Elena shrieked.

"Did you really think I would leave loose ends?" Guillermo laughed, turning his back to walk away. "You're all naive."

Suddenly, the green checkmark on Guillermo’s laptop screen flashed violent red.

A piercing alarm blared from the laptop speakers. A bold text prompt began auto-typing across the screen at lightning speed:

CRITICAL WARNING: DECRYPTION TRIGGERED TROJAN VIRUS. REVERSE-FEEDING ENCRYPTED FILES TO THE FEDERAL INVESTIGATIVE AGENCY (FGR) AND THE DEA IN 30 SECONDS.

Guillermo froze. "What is this?!" he screamed, lunging for the keyboard. "Cancel! Cancel command!"

Elena stopped crying. She looked up at Guillermo, a cold, terrifying smile breaking across her blood-stained lips.

"Did you really think I came to this house without a contingency plan, Guillermo?" Elena asked, her voice calm and lethal. "I knew the moment you got your hands on that drive, you would try to kill us all. That flash drive didn't just contain your ledgers. It contained a dead-man's switch."

"Stop it! How do I stop it?!" Guillermo yelled, wildly bashing the keys.

"You can't," Elena laughed bitterly. "The moment you entered the password—the date you burned my home—the system verified your IP address and dispatched the full, unredacted financial records of every crime you've committed in the last twenty years directly to the United States Department of Justice and the Mexican Federal Police."

"You bitch!" Guillermo roared, raising his gun to shoot her.

"And as for my brothers and sister in Zacatecas?" Elena added, her voice echoing with absolute authority. "That video feed was a recorded loop from two days ago. I moved them out of the country yesterday morning. They are currently landing at JFK Airport in New York under federal witness protection!"

Guillermo’s face went completely pale. His entire empire, built on twenty years of blood, murder, and deception, was collapsing around him in real-time.

"Kill her! Kill them both now!" Guillermo shrieked to his mercenaries.

BANG! BANG!

Two gunshots echoed through the grand dining hall—but it wasn't the mercenaries who fired.

The double doors of the kitchen slammed open. Mauricio’s personal driver and bodyguard, Mateo—a former Mexican Special Forces operative whom Mauricio had treated like a brother for a decade—stroked into the room with an automatic rifle, dropping two of Guillermo's guards before they could raise their weapons.

"Boss! Get down!" Mateo shouted.

In the chaos, Mauricio used all his physical strength to throw his weight sideways, knocking his chair over and smashing the wooden frame against the marble floor. The wood shattered, freeing his hands.

Mauricio scrambled across the floor, grabbed the fallen gun of a downed mercenary, and cut Elena’s zip-ties.

"Mauricio, look out!" Elena screamed.

Mauricio turned just in time to see his own mother, Beatriz, holding a small pearl-handled revolver aimed straight at Elena’s heart.

"You ruined us!" Beatriz screamed hysterically. "You brought the government to our doorstep! You ruined my family!"

"Mother, put the gun down!" Mauricio pleaded, standing in front of Elena.

"Move, Mauricio! Or I'll shoot through you!" Beatriz cried out, her eyes insane with greed and terror.

BANG!

A single shot rang out.

Beatriz gasped, dropping the revolver as a spot of red blossomed across her chest. She fell backward onto the velvet couch.

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"She was always hysterical," Guillermo said coldly, grabbing the laptop and running toward the back entrance of the estate. "Every man for himself!"