My husband pinned me against the kitchen counter and forced a bottle laced with chili powder toward my mouth because I refused to cook dinner exactly the way he demanded.

The rain was pouring heavily when Evelyn and I pulled up to the rear alley of Mark’s architectural firm in Evanston. The three-story brick building was completely dark, save for the faint blue glow of security sensors near the rear entrance.

My heart hammered against my ribs, but the paralyzing fear that had controlled me for years had transformed into a razor-sharp focus.

We crept up the metal fire escape stairs toward the basement access door. I swiped my silver keycard through the electronic reader.

A small green light flashed, followed by a soft magnetic click.

"We're in," I whispered.

We pulled the heavy steel door open and slipped into the cool, climate-controlled basement. The air smelled of ozone, warm plastic, and dust.

Row after row of blueprint flat-files lined the main hallway, leading toward a reinforced glass room at the back. Inside that room sat two tall black metal server racks, their indicator lights blinking silently in the dark.

"There it is," Evelyn whispered, pulling a small tactical flashlight from her pocket. "That's the central node. It routes all his private home feeds, his client surveillance logs, and his encrypted cloud uploads."

We walked quickly to the glass door. I tried my keycard on the server room lock.

BEEP-BEEP. Red light.

"Access denied," I cursed under my breath. "He changed the security tier for this room."

"Step back," Evelyn said. She looked around the hallway and grabbed a heavy steel surveyor's tripod from a storage rack.

Without hesitation, she swung the reinforced metal leg against the glass door handle. The tempered glass shattered into a thousand harmless, dull cubes, raining down onto the concrete floor.

The shrill, deafening blast of a local security alarm instantly shattered the silence of the basement.

Wail! Wail! Wail!

"We have about three minutes before the private security company calls Mark!" Evelyn shouted over the deafening noise.

We scrambled over the broken glass into the server room. Evelyn rushed to the back of the main rack, tracing thick black fiber-optic cables with her flashlight.

"Which one controls the home network?!" I yelled, grabbing a pair of heavy wire cutters from a workbench.

"The top blue module!" Evelyn shouted back. "It’s routing through an auxiliary power supply on the bottom shelf! Cut the main power trunk first, or the cloud auto-sync will trigger a emergency wipe!"

I jammed the wire cutters around the thick grey power cord leading into the back of the primary server rack. I squeezed with all my strength.

SPARK!

A shower of bright blue sparks erupted from the cable, illuminating the dark room for a fraction of a second. The high-pitched hum of the cooling fans died instantly.

The blinking indicator lights on the server rack flickered, died, and went completely dark.

Across the room, my phone buzzed in my pocket.

I pulled it out. The live security feed of my mother’s house froze, displayed a spinning wheel, and then flashed a black screen: CONNECTION LOST - SERVER OFFLINE.

"It worked!" I cried out.

"Not yet!" Evelyn yelled, pulling a USB drive from her pocket and plugging it into the secondary storage drive before the backup battery died entirely. "I'm pulling the raw, unedited camera logs from tonight’s incident in your kitchen! The original video that proves he attacked your mother!"

On the small monitor attached to the rack, a green progress bar began to fill: 30%... 60%... 90%...

CRACK!

The sudden, violent sound of a heavy door slamming shut echoed from the top of the basement stairs.