JULIANThree minutes. One hundred and eighty seconds.I let go of Marcus Sterling's collar. He dropped behind the bar like an empty sack, clutching his broken arm and sobbing into the glass on the floor.I did not look at him again. I tossed the flash drive across the counter.Raven caught it in the air and plugged it into the field terminal strapped to her chest. Her fingers flew over the keys."The lock uses SHA-512 encryption," Raven said, her voice tight as wire. "Marcus tied the bypass key to a twenty-four-digit code that changes every second. I need forty seconds to break it.""You don't have forty seconds," Vivienne said. She stepped through the broken doorway, her heels crunching on glass. She did not flinch at the blood on the floor or the groaning billionaire at her feet. Her hazel eyes went straight to the screen. "Look at the header. That isn't a custom code. It's an old Sterling Apex internal system. The key is tied to the date of the harbor lease."Vivienne reached over

JULIANThe tarnished iron key felt cold in my palm.I ran my thumb over the double-headed dragon carved into the metal. Eighteen years ago, my parents died when the family freighter, the Ashcombe Horizon, exploded in the deep channel of Emerald Bay. The Coast Guard report blamed a gas leak in the engine room. My grandfather never believed it. He had sent me here to live in poverty for three years and called it a lesson in humility. But Old Master Vance's letter had just shown me the truth.I had not been sent here to learn patience. I had been sent here to dig up the grave of a murder."Raven," I said, and my voice cut through the quiet of the penthouse lounge."Sir?""This key belongs to an old mechanical lockbox. Where is this crest registered?"Raven leaned over the table and studied scans of the dragon mark on her tablet. Her fingers moved fast across the glass."It isn't from any bank in Emerald Bay," Raven said. "It's the mark of the Dragon Deposit Trust, a private vault under t

JULIAN The basement of the Old Customs House smelled of damp stone, motor oil, and old dust. It was built in 1920, right on the waterline of Emerald Bay's oldest wharf. Under its lowest floor lay a bunker wrapped in three feet of navy-grade steel: the Dragon Deposit Trust. There were no eye scanners, no keypads, and no cameras linked to the city network. An old clerk with thin white hair and wire glasses sat behind a heavy iron cage and studied my tarnished key under an antique lamp. "Box 001," the old man rasped, and his cloudy eyes lifted to my face. "Registered sixty years ago by the Ashcombe patriarch. Nothing taken out since October 18th, 2008." The night my parents died. "Bloodline check," the clerk muttered, and slid a brass needle and a glass plate across the counter. I took the needle, pricked my right index finger without flinching, and pressed one drop of blood onto the cold glass. The machine under the desk whirred. Chemicals hissed inside the counter as they compa

JULIANThe rain had washed the dirt off the stone steps of City Hall, but it had not cooled the fire in my chest.I stood beside the back door of the Maybach and watched the red and blue lights of Chief Dalton's police car fade down Government Boulevard. Raven was inside it. Handcuffed. Taken away like a street thug for protecting me from Blackwood's hired men.Behind me, the eight operators who had walked into the chamber stood in a quiet circle, their coats buttoned over their guns."Master Julian," Briggs, my head of security, said, stepping up to my shoulder. "We have twenty men around Central Booking. Give the word, and we stop the transport before it reaches the police garage. Nobody in this city has the firepower to stop Squadron Seven.""Stand down, Briggs," I said. My voice was quiet and even. "Blackwood staged all of this in front of fifty live cameras. If we break Raven out by force, we prove his lie. We become the foreign criminals he says we are, on prime-time TV. That is