Chapter 13 - THE HIDDEN VAULT
The police swept the apartment within minutes, but the intruder had vanished into the dense autumn fog, leaving behind only the shattered window and a strange, scratched metal plate wedged into the door frame. When Grace pried the plate loose with a screwdriver, a hidden micro-SD card dropped onto the rug. Plugging it into Katherine's laptop revealed an encrypted file directory labeled Project Janus. It wasn't just a corporate slush fund; it was an extensive blackmail dossier containing financial records, secret offshore accounts, and compromising photographs of local judges, politicians, and even the chief of police who had signed off on the original reports of Beatrice’s accident four years ago. The syndicate hadn't just used Caleb and Frank as pawns—they had engineered the entire town’s local leadership, meaning the corruption ran far deeper than federal prosecutors ever realized. They weren't just fighting remnants of a family grudge; they were standing in the crosshairs of a criminal empire that still controlled half the state.
