Chapter 4 - The Truth Behind the Seattle NightThe silence in the room was suffocating. The cold metal barrels of two handguns pointed straight at my chest.
Camila sobbed softly behind me, clutching my arm. "Ethan, don't do it... he won't let you live anyway!"
"Shut up, Camila!" Arthur barked.
I looked Arthur dead in the eyes. I had spent eight years running from the ghost of my father's failure, hiding in small apartments, sweeping sawdust off construction sites, believing I was worthless. But looking at the fear in Camila's eyes and remembering the innocent faces of my three daughters, something inside me broke—and reassembled into iron.
"You think you hold all the cards, Arthur?" I said softly, stepping forward despite the gun barrels twitching toward my face. "You think that night in Seattle was just a random encounter?"
Arthur’s eyes narrowed slightly. "What are you talking about?"
"Eight years ago, I didn't just end up in that bar by accident," I lied, bluffing with every ounce of conviction I possessed. "My father left me a journal before he died. He told me about the secret deal you made with my uncle to bankrupt our company. He told me that Camila was coming to Seattle."
Camila looked up, stunned. Arthur’s posture stiffened.
"I tracked her down," I continued, taking another slow step forward. "I wanted revenge. I was going to ruin your daughter the way you ruined my father. But then I met her. I realized she didn't know anything about your crimes. She was just a girl trying to escape a monster."
"You're bluffing," Arthur hissed, though a flicker of doubt flashed across his eyes.
"Am I?" I pulled out my phone with my left hand, holding it up. "Dex! Are you streaming this?"
From the tiny speaker of my phone, Dex’s amplified voice blared into the room:
DEX: Live and loud, Ethan! We've got 40,000 people on the darknet feed, and I just mirror-broadcasted the raw audio to the FBI Regional Fraud Unit and the Wall Street Journal live desk! Say hi to the camera, Mr. Montgomery!
Arthur’s face drained of all color.
During my run through the estate, I hadn't just used Dex for directions—I had set up a hidden audio/video relay on my vest, streaming everything to Dex's offshore servers as a fail-safe.
"Kill him!" Arthur shrieked, losing his composure completely. "Shoot him now!"
BANG!
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A gun fired—but it wasn't the bodyguards.
The heavy glass balcony doors behind us exploded inward in a shower of crystal shards. Flashbangs detonated in the center of the room with a deafening CRACK, filling the air with blinding white light and disorienting smoke.
