I stared at the documents Elara had provided later that night and something felt awfully wrong about it. They were perfect, but that was the problem. They were too perfect. Every account number, every offshore shadow-path, every structural flaw in Hale’s operation lined up with an accuracy that seemed nearly impossible. In a war like this, nothing was ever that clean."Sloane has her in the hold," Helen said, her voice cutting through the silence of the library. She was standing by the door, watching me. "She’s safe, secure, and she has no way to signal the outside world. She's completely off the grid.""Pull the Brentwood collapse filings," I said, my voice sounding distant, even to my own ears. "Compare Julian’s asset liquidation from the last six months against these files. I want a cross-reference on every shell company he used to 'go broke.'"Helen squinted at me curiously for a while, then nodded and keyed the commands into the console. As the data showed on the wall screen, th

Sloane was like a ghost in the corridor and that was one thing I really loved about him. His arrival was so silent and swift that by the time I breached the medical wing, he had already established a three-point containment perimeter on my orders.Thankfully, my parents were untouched, safe and healthy. Patrick was dozing peacefully,and the steady hissing of the ventilator was the only sign of his struggle. Meanwhile, Elena sat in the corner, looking confused and terrified.I heaved a sigh of relief, but my anger was already brewing. This had been a warning, not an attempt. A simple, yet arrogant demonstration of just how far their reach went.I stood in the hallway until the hammering in my chest slowed down slightly. I didn't go in immediately because I couldn't bear for them to see the anxiety on my face."Two hours," I said to Sloane flatly, my voice choked with anger and relief. "Find the breach and bring whoever it is to me.”We didn't need the surveillance footage, the logisti

There were a lot of strange things about Kingston I was still getting to learn about. First, was the audacity of rivals to openly organize a meeting with someone actively trying to run them into the mud.Hale requested a meeting through his counsel, and made sure that every detail was carefully and duly documented. The physician’s report was on the table before the coffee was even served.It presented a case of advanced cardiac failure, it was irreversible, and looked more like a ticking clock that rendered any prison sentence irrelevant. Hale made it clear that he didn't want a fight, he simply wanted to fade away without the indignity of a steel cell.I didn't invite a crowd to the meeting. I brought Weil to handle the ink, Davis to verify the data, Constance Albright to serve as a witness to the dissolution of her former masters, and a high-ranking official from the Kingston regulatory board to ensure the records were sealed the moment they were typed.For two hours, Victor Hale d

Sloane didn’t take long to get the answer the detective didn’t have. The look on his face wasn’t exactly perplexed, he was just annoyed that he hadn’t figured it out sooner.But as for me? I was stunned and nearly even impressed. “What the fuck?” I asked and looked up at him, "You think it was Beatrice?"Sloane didn’t even look up from his tablet. He just tapped the screen a few more times before turning it toward me. "Look at it all closely, boss. The components, the wiring, the specific chemical signature of the incendiaries—it’s all there, Carter. She didn't build the bombs herself, but she paid the right people to make sure they pointed at you."I sat back, feeling a weird, hollow sensation in my chest. I scoffed and mumbled, "Beatrice. Elara's mother. That family doesn’t just want to stay away, do they?""Exactly," Sloane said, his tone grim. "She’s been in contact with the leftovers of Hale since before the wedding crash. She went to them independently, and she went to them w

Sloane had been quiet for weeks because his focus had narrowed to a single point, which was the digital and human rot festering within the East side of Kingston. It had started with a low-level bagman he’d squeezed in a damp basement off 4th Street, a man who eventually realized that his fragile loyalty to Julian was worth less than his own skin. Sloane had spent months grooming him, feeding him small, meaningless scraps of information to build his credibility, slowly weaving him into the core of the East Kingston network. It was the kind of long-term investment that usually paid off in either a mountain of data…or a shallow grave.We were sitting in the library and the morning air was thick with the smell of roasted beans. We drank coffee by the balcony, overlooking the city like two men who owned it. I scoffed silently when I thought about when I had first taken my inheritance. I had thought I already owned it all."The network is fragile, Carter," Sloane said. "Julian is losing