Rise to Power: The Miraculous Liam Regan.

Chapter 21

Liam said nothing more.

He knew, with a sick certainty, that there was nothing he could say right now that would make them leave him alone. Nothing he could say that would suddenly make them trust him, believe him, or even pause long enough to hear him out properly. At this point, any wrong word might only make things worse.

So he made the only choice left to him.

He lowered his head and followed.

Inside, humiliation burned through him almost as fiercely as fear. He was exhausted, shaken, and painfully aware of how helpless he looked. And beneath all of it, one thought kept pounding through his mind with bitter clarity—"Victoria did this."

"Victoria and Benjamin., It had to be them. Who else could have designed something this cruel? Who else could have set me up so perfectly and then vanished, leaving me standing alone in the center of the disaster?"

The more he thought of it, the more convinced he became. This was not random. This was not an accident. This was a trap, carefully laid and now springing shut around him.

He walked beside the guards while Penelope moved with quiet authority at his side. No one spoke. The silence on the way there felt heavier than chains.

Before long, they reached the vault room, deep within the VIP section of the bank.

The moment Liam saw where they had taken him, his body began to tremble in earnest.

This was no ordinary office. No routine questioning chamber. Everything about the place radiated secrecy and consequence. And standing there, with armed security around him and nowhere to run, he suddenly felt the full weight of his situation.

One mistake just oncould end everything.

If they decided he was guilty, that would be it. His life as he knew it would be over. He could be thrown into prison for years, maybe for life. Worse.

In a society like this, accusations of fraud were not treated lightly, especially when they involved levels far above his own. An E-level citizen implicated in a case like this was not given mercy. He was made into an example.

By the time they stopped, his hands were already cold.

Then, with a voice that trembled despite all his effort to steady it, Liam looked at Penelope and spoke again.

“There is a mistake somewhere,” he said. “Please… I really need to know who sent that money. If I know that, then I’ll be able to explain what happened what led to all of this.”

Penelope regarded him calmly, her face unreadable.

“You need to calm down,” she said. “We are going to do our due diligence, and we are going to make sure we get the answers we all want.”

Even then, Penelope still found the entire situation difficult to believe.

Nothing about Liam matched the scale of the money sitting in his account. From his appearance alone, he looked like an ordinary man plain, strained, and far removed from the kind of wealth that could command five hundred million dollars without explanation. Even the way he spoke now, broken by panic and confusion, carried a kind of rawness that seemed almost genuine.

Penelope had spent too many years in her position to be moved by appearances alone. She knew very well that desperation made people clever. And E-level citizens, especially those ground down by poverty and exclusion, were often capable of things the upper classes dismissed until it was too late. They could lie. They could scheme. They could force openings where none existed. If money was involved, some would risk everything just to touch it.

So no she would not trust him. Not yet.

Still, she would do what she always did. She would investigate thoroughly, methodically, and without sentiment. Whatever truth was buried in this transaction, she would drag it into the light.

With that thought, she turned and gestured to one of the women stationed inside the vault room.

“Bring the machine,” she said.

The woman immediately obeyed. A moment later, she returned carrying a compact biometric scanner and placed it carefully on the table. It was a fingerprint-tracing device one used for deep financial authentication, internal access review, and origin verification on restricted transfers. Not the kind of machine brought out for ordinary customers.

Penelope looked back at Liam.

“Scan your finger,” she instructed. “Once you do, we’ll be able to trace where the money came from, who sent it, and the full transaction details.”

Liam swallowed hard and nodded.

Despite the fear shaking through him, a desperate hope stirred in his chest. He found himself praying that the name attached to the transfer would be Victoria’s. Or Benjamin’s. "Let it be one of them. Let it be either of them." Even if that opened another problem another accusation, another trap it would at least be something concrete. Something he could point to. Something he could build a defense around.

Because right now, he had nothing.

If the system showed Victoria or Benjamin as the source, then maybe just maybe he could explain the rest. Maybe he could tell the story before they buried him under their own version of it.

At that moment his hand trembled as he reached forward.

Then, slowly, he placed his finger on the scanner.

The machine lit up at once.

A soft hum filled the room as lines of encrypted data began to move across the attached display. Everyone in the vault turned toward it. For one suspended second, no one spoke. No one even seemed to breathe.

Then the information resolved on the screen of Penelope iPad.

And the moment Penelope saw it, her eyes widened.