2026-03-07 23:30:00I walked out of the room. I walked past Cecil, who turned his back on me as I passed. I walked out into the cold night air.
As soon as the door closed behind me, I ripped the fifty-thousand-dollar check into confetti and threw it into the gutter.I rounded the corner into a dark alleyway. It smelled of wet garbage and stale beer. A rat scurried behind a dumpster.I leaned against the brick wall, my breath coming in white puffs. I unbuckled my belt and shoved my pant
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CHAPTER 69
I was dragged out of the house in handcuffs. Not arrested yet, but detained for "safety."We arrived at the hospital. A crowd had already gathered. Social media moves faster than light."Baby Killer!" someone screamed.A rock hit the police cruiser window. Crack. The glass spiderwebbed."Monster!""Die, St. Claire!"I looked out the window. There were hundreds of them. People with signs. People with hate in their eyes. They looked like demons.[System Warning: Social Infamy 95%.][Critical Alert: Public Hostility at Maximum. System Lock Imminent.]The red text filled my vision, blinding me.The police dragged me through the crowd to get to the entrance. A fist flew out of the mob—a man in a grey hoodie—and hit me in the jaw. I tasted blood.Someone spit on me. It landed on my cheek, warm and disgusting."He deserves to hang!" an old woman yelled, shaking her cane at me.
CHAPTER 68
I felt a rush of vindication so strong it almost knocked me over. The air in my lungs felt cleaner. I wasn't crazy. I wasn't paranoid."Why?" I asked. "Why go to all this trouble?""Because of the contract," Aris spilled, the words tumbling out now. "She told me if she gets pregnant, she gets the estate if you divorce her. She needed a safety net until the merger was signed. She said... she said she would destroy me if I didn't help her.""She is a monster," I muttered."She is terrifying," Aris agreed, wiping sweat from his upper lip."She is going to be too busy trying to stay out of jail to ruin anyone," I said.I pulled a piece of paper and a pen from the envelope."Write it down. Everything you just said. Date it. Sign it."Aris grabbed the pen. He wrote against the hood of his car. His handwriting was messy, erratic, but legible. He signed it with a shaky hand.I took the paper. I checked the sign
CHAPTER 67
I walked out of the room. I walked past Cecil, who turned his back on me as I passed. I walked out into the cold night air.As soon as the door closed behind me, I ripped the fifty-thousand-dollar check into confetti and threw it into the gutter.I rounded the corner into a dark alleyway. It smelled of wet garbage and stale beer. A rat scurried behind a dumpster.I leaned against the brick wall, my breath coming in white puffs. I unbuckled my belt and shoved my pants down to my knees.I grabbed the duct tape."One, two, three," I counted.I ripped it off."Aaargh!"The scream tore out of my throat. The tape took a patch of skin with it, leaving a raw, bleeding rectangle on my inner thigh. The cold air hit the wound like a brand.I didn't care.I held the cheap plastic recorder in my hands. I pressed rewind. I held it up to my ear and pressed play....I paid off the union leaders... I b
CHAPTER 66
The prep work had been agonizing. In the damp silence of the basement, I had spent the last hour shaving my inner thigh with a dull razor I found in an old travel kit.The skin was raw and stinging even before I applied the duct tape.I stared at the cheap, plastic analog tape recorder. It was a relic from the nineties, something I had dug out of a box of my father’s old things that Sarah hadn't bothered to sell.It was bulky, ugly, and had no digital signal for a jammer to pick up."Don't jam," I whispered to the machine. "Just spin."I taped it to my leg, winding the silver duct tape tight enough to cut off circulation.I put on the oversized, thrift-store trousers Sarah had left for me. They were baggy enough to hide the bulge, but every step sent a sharp pull of pain up my groin.Pain was good. Pain kept me focused.I left the estate through the service entrance, dodging the cameras I knew by heart.
CHAPTER 65
I sat in the basement, the blue light of the monitor reflecting in my eyes."Jericho Protocol."I had searched for it on the Blackwood servers using Adekunle’s connection. It was there. Buried deep behind a firewall that even Glitch couldn't crack from the outside.It was an air-gapped server. Meaning it wasn't connected to the internet. To access it, someone had to physically plug a drive into the mainframe in Julian Blackwood’s office.I couldn't get into that office. I was persona non grata.But Sarah could.Sarah had access to everything. And Sarah had one weakness that overrode all her caution.Greed.I pulled up a program I had been writing for the last three nights. It was a nasty piece of code. A Trojan Horse.I labeled the folder: OFFSHORE_BITCOIN_KEYS_DO_NOT_TOUCH.Inside, I created a fake digital wallet. I made it look like it held 500 Bitcoin. At current market rates, that was nearl
CHAPTER 64
I slipped through the service entrance of the specialized care facility. It was midnight. The halls smelled of antiseptic and lavender air freshener—the smell of expensive dying. I didn't have to sneak past the front desk. Isabella had arranged it. The two massive guards standing by the elevator nodded at me as I approached. They were her men, not Sarah’s. "She is awake," one of them grunted. "But keep it short. The nurse does rounds in twenty minutes." "Thank you," I whispered. I went up to the fourth floor. Room 402. I opened the door slowly. The room was dark, lit only by the streetlights filtering through the blinds. My mother was sitting up in bed. She looked so small. Her white hair was thin, her skin like parchment paper. In my first life, she had died thinking I was a failure. She had died while I was busy trying to save a company that was already dead.
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