Chapter 6 - The Trap Closes"Open the door!" Lucas shouted, running to the heavy steel shutter and banging his small fists against it until his skin grew red. "Let us out! My mom is in the hospital!"
"They can't hear you, Lucas," Thomas said, stepping up behind the boy and pulling him back protectively. "The comms are jammed. This whole floor has just been isolated from the rest of the building. To the rest of Laurent Enterprises, we don't exist right now."
Thomas’s mind raced. He pulled out his encrypted satellite phone, the one device linked directly to his personal offshore servers, independent of the corporate network. He pressed speed dial one.
“The subscriber you have dialed is currently out of service or operating in a restricted secure zone,” a robotic operator droned.
"Damn it!" Thomas cursed, slamming his fist against the concrete pillar.
"Mr. Laurent," Lucas said, pointing to a small, blinking red light embedded in the wall near the floor vents. "What's that?"
Thomas dropped to one knee. It wasn't a standard fire alarm sensor. It was a localized thermal surveillance tap—a listening device wired directly into the executive boardroom upstairs.
Through the tiny grille, muffled voices drifted down. They weren't whispering; they were arguing with the casual arrogance of men who believed they had already won.
"...are you completely insane, Vance?" barked a sharp, elderly voice that Thomas recognized instantly: Jonathan Sterling, head of the Board’s Ethics and Oversight Committee, and his father’s oldest, most trusted ally. "If Thomas finds out about the 2017 restructuring funds, the entire succession is void! The company goes into receivership!"
"I didn't invite the kid up here!" Vance’s voice snapped back over the feed. "The kid bypassed security because the morning shift was shorthanded. But Thomas took the bait. He went down to Sector Four himself. Once the gas containment protocol finishes venting, they'll both be asleep. We wipe the local server, claim a chemical leak accident, just like we did with David Evans seven years ago."
Thomas felt his blood turn to ice water. The betrayal wasn't a corporate accident. It was a coup orchestrated by the very men he sat across from every single day.
"Just like my dad," Lucas whispered, his voice dangerously calm—a chilling maturity cutting through his childish frame. He looked up at Thomas with tear-filled, blazing eyes. "They killed him, didn't they? Because he found out where the money was going."
Thomas didn't lie. He couldn't. He placed a heavy, reassuring hand on the boy's shoulder.
"They made a mistake, Lucas," Thomas growled, standing up to his full height, his eyes burning with a terrifying, predatory resolve. "They thought they buried the past in the basement. But they forgot to check who had the keys."
Thomas walked over to the manual ventilation override lever on the wall. It was sealed behind a thick glass panel labeled: EMERGENCY USE ONLY – AUTOMATIC FIRING SHUTDOWN.
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"Mr. Laurent," Lucas asked, clutching Mr. Buttons to his chest. "What are you going to do?"
"We're going to crash the market," Thomas said, smashing his elbow straight through the glass panel.
