Chapter 6 - Shadows from the Past
When I returned to New York, Kareem Rahal was waiting at his penthouse headquarters with a bottle of sparkling cider and a proud smile.
"Word travels fast in Geneva," Kareem said, pouring two glasses. "Viktor Vance folded like a cheap tent. Tariq tells me you handled him with the surgical precision of your grandmother."
"It wasn't easy," I admitted, taking a sip. "His guards looked ready to throw me out the window."
"That's why you had Tariq at your flank," Kareem said. But his expression quickly sobered. "However, our victory in Geneva has stirred up older, more dangerous waters. Viktor Vance wasn't acting alone. He was being financed by a faction that has been trying to usurp my shipping routes for years—led by a man named Julian Sterling."
"Julian Sterling?"
"An Anglo-American corporate raider with deep ties to international syndicates," Kareem explained, pulling up a digital dossier on his tablet. "Sterling hates that an Arab-led syndicate controls the North Atlantic maritime corridors. And when he heard that a young woman named Nia Brooks—bearing the name Margaret Brooks—had suddenly entered my inner circle... he took notice."
"What does my grandmother have to do with Julian Sterling?" I asked, a cold knot forming in my stomach.
"Everything," Kareem said grimly. "Back in 1985, right after your grandmother saved my life, she worked a second job as a private nurse for an ailing shipping magnate in Manhattan—Julian Sterling’s uncle. That uncle tried to liquidate his estate and hand the shipping routes to a corrupt cartel. Margaret intercepted him. She exposed his embezzlement, saving the company from ruin and bankrupting the elder Sterling in the process."
I stared at the tablet screen displaying Julian Sterling's cold, aristocratic face. "So Julian blames my grandmother for ruining his family fortune."
"Exactly," Kareem said. "And now he sees you as the ultimate leverage to break me."
Before I could process the warning, the security alarms across the penthouse flashed red.
The lights flickered and died.
May you like
Emergency backup generators hummed to life, casting a harsh crimson glow over the room.
"Intruders," Tariq barked, drawing a suppressed sidearm from his jacket as he rushed to the reinforced steel door. "Perimeter breach on the seventeenth floor!"
