Chapter 4 - THE HIDDEN SPECIFICATIONSI left Sarah under the strict watch of a private security firm I hired out of my own pocket, explicitly ordering them to shoot anyone who tried to enter her room without my approval—especially my mother.
By midnight, I was standing outside my own home.
The perimeter lights I had designed cast long, ominous shadows over the gray concrete walls of the estate. The yellow police tape across the front door fluttered in the freezing Chicago wind.
Technically, I was breaking the law by entering. The police had secured the site, and Margaret claimed ownership. But I didn't care anymore.
I pulled out my master bypass keycard—a piece of hardware I had secretly coded into the home's smart grid—and swiped it against the hidden reader by the side entrance. The heavy steel door unlocked with a quiet click.
I slipped inside.
The silence of the house was deafening. The smell of smoke and burned insulation still hung in the air near the stairs. I made my way directly to my private study on the third floor.
If Margaret was using the house's legal deed against me, I needed to find out how she got it. My father was a meticulous man; he would never have signed over our real estate assets to an offshore shell company unless he was forced—or dead.
I pulled up the original CAD drawings of the house from my encrypted cloud server.
I scanned through the structural layers I had drawn five years ago.
Basement... Main floor... Master suite... Attic...
Then I noticed an anomaly.
In the digital blueprint file, the total square footage was listed as 8,400 square feet. But the structural load calculations on the foundation showed a displacement consistent with 9,200 square feet.
There was an unaccounted space—an 800-square-foot void located beneath the underground wine cellar.
I hadn't designed that void.
I zoomed in on the original file properties. The blueprints had been modified three months after I submitted them to the contractor. The digital signature on the modification didn't belong to me.
It belonged to my father’s personal lawyer: Harold Finch.
Suddenly, the lights in the study flickered and turned bright red.
ALERT: MOTION DETECTED IN SUB-LEVEL B.
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My heart hammered against my ribs. Someone else was in the house.
I pulled a tactical flashlight and a heavy steel wrench from my tool drawer and headed quietly down the stairs toward the basement.
