Chapter 13 - THE WHISPER IN THE DARKThree weeks later, the peace of our expansion was interrupted by an encrypted alert on our corporate defense servers.
It wasn't a cyberattack. It was a digital dead-man's switch.
An anonymous message routed through a dark-web relay popped up on my private terminal late at night while the rest of the tower was dead silent.
“The Queens venture wasn't Marcus Vance’s only project, Isabella. There’s a second vault. And someone is already inside it.”
My fingers hovered over the keyboard. I traced the metadata of the transmission. It originated from an IP address registered to an abandoned shipping dock in Bayonne, New Jersey—the very dock where Marcus Vance used to unload his illicit cargo before his arrest.
I didn't call the police. I didn't wait for morning.
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I grabbed my coat, keyed my private elevator down to the underground garage, and texted Luca one single word: Meet me.
Within twenty minutes, our armored black SUV was tearing down the turnpike toward the deserted industrial coastline of New Jersey, cutting through the thick fog rolling in off the Atlantic.
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