Chapter ElevenThe first bullet hit the rear window three seconds after Ethan turned onto Sunset.Glass exploded inward in a glittering spray. The second shot punched through the headrest where his skull had been a heartbeat earlier. Ethan swerved hard right, tires screaming, and the gray sedan nearly clipped a parked delivery van before he straightened it out and floored the accelerator.The black SUV stayed with him.He had been clean for eleven minutes. Eleven minutes of empty side streets and the false belief that the alarm at Hale’s estate had bought him distance. The folders and hard drive slid across the passenger seat as the car took the next corner too fast. One of the folders flipped open; a page of dense accounting ledgers fluttered against the dashboard like a white flag no one was going to honor.Ethan did not look at it. He kept both hands on the wheel and the speed climbing.The secondary phone lit up on the center console. Liv’s name.He answered on speaker without tak

Chapter ThirteenThe van did not stop for twenty-seven minutes.When it finally slowed, it was inside a windowless warehouse in an industrial pocket of Vernon that smelled of solvent and old concrete. Elena Moreau stood waiting beside a folding table under a single hanging LED. Two of her people were already transferring Ellie onto a proper medical cot. A third was connecting the hard drive to an air-gapped terminal.Liv’s voice was the first to break the silence after the doors sealed.“Her name is Maya Chen. She’s twenty. Computer science. Same program as me. She covered my shifts at the campus help desk so I could stay at the hospital. She has a little brother in high school and parents who think she’s still in the dorm.”No one answered. There was nothing useful to say.Elena turned the terminal screen toward them. A live feed filled the display—grainy, low-light, timestamped only seconds earlier. A small, windowless room. Concrete walls. A single metal chair. Maya sat in it with

Chapter FifteenThe first federal vehicles reached the cold-storage facility six minutes after the sirens became audible.Ethan stood in the open loading bay with Maya Chen wrapped in a tactical jacket two sizes too large, watching the blue and red lights turn the wet asphalt into something almost beautiful. Elena’s operators had already melted back into the industrial dark the moment the first marked unit appeared. Only the evidence remained: the decoy drive still connected to the open laptop, the scattered folders, and Victor Hale sitting on the concrete floor with his back against the steel rack, staring at nothing.Agents in windbreakers moved with practiced efficiency. One of them crouched in front of Hale, recited rights in a flat voice, and waited. Hale did not resist when they lifted him to his feet. The handcuffs made a soft, final sound.Sophia was found still standing in the same shadow where she had watched everything collapse. She did not run. When an agent approached she

Chapter SeventeenThe second envelope did not come to the house.It came to Liv’s university email at 3:17 a.m., routed through so many anonymous relays that the header information was useless. The subject line was blank. The body contained only a link and a single sentence:She kept better records than you.Liv woke Ethan and Ellie before she opened it.The link led to a private server that demanded no password. Inside was a single folder labeled with the old corporate seal of Reynolds Dynamics—the one Ellie had ordered destroyed in 2005. The folder held scanned pages of a partnership agreement Ethan had never seen. Three signatures at the bottom. Ellie’s. Their father’s. And a third name written in the same precise hand that had addressed the photograph:Mara Voss.Not Elena. Mara.Liv zoomed in on the final page. The agreement allocated the company’s residual assets in the event of dissolution: forty percent to Ellie, thirty to their father, thirty to Mara Voss. A handwritten adden

Chapter 19The casino smelled like desperation and expensive perfume, and Ethan had been breathing both for the last three hours.He watched Kofi Adomako from across the private gaming room, studying the man who had stood beside Sophia while she'd torn Ethan's life apart. Kofi was handsome in that polished, calculated way—expensive suit, perfect smile, eyes that never stopped scanning the room for advantage. He was a predator, but he was also a gambler. And gamblers always had a tell.Ethan's was patience."Mr. Sterling," Kofi said, approaching the table with practiced ease. "I understand you're interested in a private game."Ethan rose, extending his hand. "I've heard you're the man to beat in Zurich."Kofi's smile widened, but his eyes remained cold. "You've heard correctly. Though I must admit, I don't recognize your name. Sterling... are you related to the German Sterlings?""American. I made my money in biotech." Ethan gestured to the table. "Shall we?"They played for two hours.