Reclaiming Back My Empire

Chapter 8

​"You can't do this legally!" Raymond screamed desperately. "This house is registered under the family trust! I am a co-trustee!"

​"You were a co-trustee," James Vance corrected, stepping forward and holding up a stamped court document. "Under the emergency judicial injunction signed tonight, all secondary trustees suspected of grand fraud and treasonous conspiracy against the principal owner are stripped of all residential rights. If you remain on these premises in four minutes, my guards are authorized to remove you using lethal force for criminal home invasion."

​Raymond looked at James, then at the stone-faced armed guards standing by the doorway, their hands resting firmly on their tactical holsters.

​He realized, with sickening horror, that there was no way out. The empire had closed its gates on him.

​"Come on," Raymond muttered, his voice cracking with defeat. He grabbed two of the heavy plastic trash bags, his hands shaking so badly he nearly dropped them. "Tommy, get up! Grab your bags!"

​Tommy, still weeping and rubbing his throat, scrambled to his feet and grabbed three bags of his clothes, practically running toward the open front doors.

​Vanessa stayed on her knees for a few seconds longer, staring at Derek with wide, hollow eyes. "Derek... what about my mother? The hospital... they will stop her treatment if the funds aren't wired by tomorrow morning."

​Derek looked down at her, his expression as blank as a frozen lake.

​"Then I suggest you find a job, Vanessa."

​He turned his back on her completely and walked back toward his leather armchair by the fire.

​Vanessa felt a cold, empty darkness swallow her whole. Knowing that any further begging was useless, she pushed herself up from the floor with trembling arms. Grabbing a single cardboard box filled with her belongings, she stumbled out into the pouring rain.

​Standing on the grand stone porch, the three of them watched in absolute despair as the heavy oak double doors of Ashford Manor slammed shut with a thunderous, echoing boom.

​A second later, the heavy electronic deadbolts clicked into place.

​The rain beat down mercilessly upon them, instantly soaking their clothes, turning their cardboard boxes to soggy mush, and chilling them to the bone. They stood alone in the dark, flooded driveway of the estate they thought they had stolen, with no money, no phones, and nowhere to run.

​Inside the grand hall, the silence was warm and heavy.

​Derek sat back down in the leather armchair. He reached out and stroked Buster’s thick fur, listening to the crackle of the oak logs in the fireplace.

​James Vance walked over to the side table, his expression completely serious. He pulled a thick, encrypted military-grade tablet from his trench coat and unlocked the screen.

​"They're gone, Boss," James said quietly. "The outer perimeter gates are locked. My men are tracking their footsteps down the public access road. They won't make it two miles before local patrol picks them up for vagrancy."

​"Good," Derek replied smoothly, keeping his eyes on the dancing flames. "Let them walk in the mud. Let them feel what it's like to have the world vanish beneath their feet."

​"There is something else, Derek," James added, his voice dropping low, a tense edge creeping into his tone. "Something you need to see right now."

​Derek turned his gaze away from the fire, looking up at his head of security. "What is it?"

​James tapped the screen of the tablet twice and handed it to Derek.

​"While you were dealing with Raymond and Vanessa, our tech team finished running the background trace on the Master Security Override mainframe from the Custom House gala."

​Derek took the tablet. On the screen was an intricate digital data log showing the exact electronic signals that had hijacked the communication network during the event.

​"What am I looking at, James?" Derek asked, his eyebrows knitting together.

​"It wasn't Raymond who tried to erase the security footage at the Custom House," James revealed, his voice grim. "Raymond doesn't have the brains or the clearance for this level of code. Look at the digital signature on line forty-two."

​Derek’s sharp eyes scanned the glowing lines of code. At the bottom of the data string was a classified, twenty-four-digit military encryption key—a specific protocol used only by deep-state defense contractors.

​And beneath the encryption key was a single, automated routing address that belonged to a private, heavily fortified server located right in the heart of Charleston.

​"Dominic Sterling," Derek muttered, his fingers tightening around the tablet until the glass screen creaked under his immense grip.

​"It goes deeper than that, Boss," James whispered, leaning closer, his eyes wide with a cold, unsettling dread. "We pulled the flight telemetry logs from your private jet’s black box recovery server. Raymond thought he sabotaged your plane by just stealing the emergency manual key."

​James paused, swallowing hard before delivering the truth.

​"He didn't know someone else was on that plane's network hours before you took off. The malware that locked your steering controls didn't come from inside the cockpit, Derek. It was uploaded from a satellite relay station owned by the Ashford Foundation itself."

​Derek froze. His heart stopped beating for an entire second.

​"The Ashford Foundation?" Derek whispered, the words tasting like poison on his tongue. "Only three people in the entire world held the administrative biometric keys to that specific satellite server."

​"Yes," James said, his voice barely audible over the crackling fire. "You, your late mother..."

​James stopped, looking directly into Derek’s scarred, frozen face.

​"And the father you buried fifteen years ago."