Chapter 3 - The Ghost in the Machine
Back at the Montauk estate, the house felt different. The oppressive, ghostly silence that had weighed down the hallways for months was broken by the sound of Theo resting upstairs under the care of a trusted pediatrician.
In his underground home office, surrounded by banks of monitors and security feeds, Adrian plugged Callie’s cracked phone into his encrypted master terminal.
The phone’s operating system was ancient, but the data extraction software Adrian used could pull deleted files from the flash memory down to the sector.
"Sir," his chief of digital security, Marcus Vance (no relation to the legal team), murmured over his shoulder. "We’ve got a full cloud sync backup from the phone’s internal history. It looks like Mrs. Vale was uploading files right up until twenty minutes before the crash."
"Show me," Adrian ordered.
A folder opened on the primary screen. It wasn't just videos of Harbor House. It was a digital ledger.
There were scanned documents detailing embezzlement within Vale Global’s charitable foundation—funds that had been funneled through shell companies managed by Julian Vance, Adrian’s own cousin and the Chief Operating Officer of the corporation.
Worse still, there was an audio recording dated three days before the crash.
Adrian clicked play.
Julian’s voice boomed through the high-end speakers, cold and furious: "If Maris goes to the board with these financial discrepancies, the entire merger collapses. Vale Global goes under, and Adrian takes the fall for securities fraud. She needs to be stopped, Aunt Helen."
Adrian stopped breathing. Helen—Julian’s mother—had replied with a chilling laugh: "Accidents happen in the rain, Julian. Make sure the brakes are done by Thursday."
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The room spun. The crash wasn't a random act of god. It was a calculated assassination attempt meant for Adrian, which Maris had intercepted because she had taken his car that evening to pick up supplies for Harbor House.
The targets were supposed to be Adrian and Maris. Instead, Maris died, and Theo was left broken in a wheelchair.
