Chapter 6 - The Decryption
Damian stepped forward, placing a heavy hand on my shoulder. The touch was grounding, pulling me back from the precipice of a murder that would tie my hands to the very monsters I was fighting.
"Step back, Emily," Damian said quietly.
I slowly released Sterling’s tie, letting the Chairman slump back into his chair, gasping for air and coughing hysterically as he massaged his bruised neck.
Damian leaned over the desk, pressing the barrel of his own weapon firmly against Sterling’s temple. "Disable the switch, Arthur. Now. Open the terminal and transfer all decryption keys to my tablet."
With shaking, trembling fingers, Sterling reached out and punched a sequence of keys into his custom mechanical keyboard. A green progress bar filled the screen of his monitor as gigabytes of encrypted files began downloading onto the secure drive Vance had plugged into the USB port.
"It's... it's all there," Sterling whispered, sweat pouring down his pale forehead. "Every record. Every name on the board who funded the operation. You have what you wanted. Let me go."
Damian didn't lower his gun. Instead, he looked over his shoulder at Vance, who was monitoring the download progress.
"Download complete, boss," Vance confirmed, pulling the drive from the tower. "We have the entire network."
"Good," Damian said coldly.
Sterling let out a ragged sigh of relief, thinking he had bought his way out. "You see? We can be reasonable men, Damian. We can—"
The sound of the office door opening behind us made every muscle in my body lock up.
We spun around, weapons raised, expecting a tactical team of mercenaries.
Instead, standing in the doorway was a woman holding a small, silver-barreled revolver, her eyes wide with a manic, desperate energy.
Elena Marchetti.
I gasped, stumbling backward against the desk.
Damian froze, his gun dropping an inch as he stared at the woman standing before him—the wife he had buried three weeks ago, the woman whose staged car accident had supposedly left him a grieving widower.
"Elena?" Damian whispered, the name sounding like a curse broken from a shattered dream. "You're... you're dead."
Elena let out a harsh, broken laugh, her hair damp, her designer dress torn at the shoulder. "Did you really think a cliffside drop and a burning chassis was enough to kill me, Damian? I built this syndicate with Arthur long before I ever met you. You were just a convenient shield, a powerful monster to keep the wolves away from our door."
She raised her revolver, her hand shaking violently as she aimed it straight at my chest.
"And you," Elena hissed, glaring at me with unadulterated venom. "You just couldn't stay in your lane, could you? A diner waitress. A nobody. Walking into my nursery and claiming what I paid millions to acquire."
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"Elena, put the gun down," Damian commanded, his voice dropping into a terrifyingly lethal tone as he slowly shifted his aim from Sterling to his resurrected wife. "It's over. We have every file. The network is dead."
"If I go down, we all burn," Elena shrieked, her finger tightening on the trigger. "And it starts with the mother!"
