Chapter 151Kris worked with methodical precision as alarms began echoing through Ashford Tower.The moment Park's suppressed weapon fired in the corridor below, every alarm in the building triggered simultaneously. Red emergency lights flooded the server room, casting everything in crimson shadows. Klaxons wailed through the intercom system, automated announcements declaring security breach and lockdown initiation.She'd breached the server room's electronic locks using skills she'd learned from years of analyzing the Kardashian family's business operations—understanding corporate security protocols, knowing the standard vulnerability patterns that technology companies built into their systems. She'd spent nights studying her family's own security infrastructure, learning how to identify weaknesses that even professional security consultants missed.The encrypted financial servers took longer. Much longer. The encryption layers were sophisticated, military-grade protocols designed to

Chapter 153Adrian studied Vivian's face in the amber light, looking for the deception. The angle of attack hidden behind reasonable words and measured composure. Ten years of warfare had taught him that surrender was often the opening move of a more sophisticated assault.Vivian waited, seemingly content to let him search."You spent a decade serving her," Adrian said. "Building her network. Coordinating her operations. You arranged the mercenary assault on my family. You managed the financial infrastructure that funded human experimentation." His voice was quiet, carrying the flat weight of enumerated facts. "And now you want me to believe you've had a change of heart.""Not a change of heart," Vivian corrected. "A change of calculation."She stood slowly from the desk. She walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out at the Capital's skyline, her reflection ghosting across the glass."When I joined Natasha's organization, she was brilliant. Ruthless, yes. Morally compromis

Chapter 155The descent was forty-five stories of controlled violence against physics.Adrian and Rodriguez dropped fast, wind tearing sideways between skyscrapers, rope burning through tactical gloves. The Capital's grid of light stretched below — indifferent, unknowing. Adrian hit the forty-fifth floor maintenance platform three seconds after Rodriguez, already unclipping, already moving."Skybridge. Twenty meters east," Rodriguez said. "Connects to the Meridian Building."Above them, flashlight beams swept from the blown-out windows of the fifty-eighth floor. Seconds before those beams angled downward and found the rappelling lines.They ran.The skybridge was a glass-enclosed walkway between the two towers — empty at midnight, dark, accessible through a maintenance hatch that Rodriguez bypassed in three seconds of electronic negotiation. They dropped inside and sprinted, boots echoing on glass flooring, the Capital skyline glittering uselessly on either side.Adrian's comm crackle

Chapter 157The Ashford scandal burned through its first forty-eight hours like wildfire through dry timber — fast, hot, and consuming everything it touched. Federal investigators worked around the clock, processing the financial evidence Kris had released, issuing warrants, conducting arrests, building cases that expanded in scope with every cooperating witness who decided that loyalty to a collapsed corporation was worth less than reduced sentencing.Then the media found the deeper story.It started with a journalist at an investigative outlet — a woman named Catherine Reeves who had spent three years trying to penetrate Ashford's operations through traditional reporting methods and had been stonewalled at every turn. When the data dump landed on her desk, she didn't focus on the financial corruption that every other outlet was already covering. She followed a different thread — a series of payments coded as "Phase Development" that didn't correspond to any of Ashford's known pharma

Chapter 159The war council convened at dawn the following morning in the bunker complex's command center. Adrian stood at the head of the tactical table, Vivian's black folder open in front of him, its contents transferred to the digital displays that covered three walls.Station Omega filled the main screen — satellite imagery overlaid with the architectural blueprints Vivian had provided. Three underground levels carved into Arctic permafrost, connected by reinforced corridors designed to withstand the geological pressures of a shifting ice sheet. The facility sat eight hundred miles north of the nearest civilian settlement, accessible only by air or by specialized ground transport during the brief summer months when the surface ice thinned enough to support vehicles.Summer was over. The ice had returned. Which meant air insertion was the only viable approach."HALO deployment," Adrian said, pointing to the approach vectors Vivian had annotated in red. "High-altitude, low-opening