Chapter 6 - The Unraveling
"We don't have time to burn everything," Richard said, his voice laced with pure panic as he shoved stacks of bonds into a leather duffel bag. "The bank accounts in the Caymans are frozen, Brooke! Someone leaked our routing numbers to the Treasury Department this morning!"
Brooke stopped dead in her tracks, a stack of blue files clutched in her hands. Her face drained of all color. "What do you mean frozen? That money was moved through three secure proxies!"
"Clare," Richard spat out, his hands shaking violently as he tried to zip the bag. "It was Clare! She didn't just audit our files when she worked for the task force years ago—she knew our shell company names! She’s been building this trap for months!"
Inside the brick wall, I smiled quietly.
They thought I was just reacting. They had no idea that the moment Richard asked me to review his firm's tax filings six months ago, I recognized the fraudulent structures instantly. I had quietly fed the data to Evelyn, waiting for the exact moment they made a critical error. My business trip to Newark hadn't been a trap set by them—it had been a setup orchestrated by me to pull federal investigators into their network while I was safely off-site.
The only thing I hadn't calculated was Brooke’s absolute insanity—and her willingness to use my daughter as a hostage when she felt the net tightening.
"It doesn't matter," Brooke said, her voice dropping into a chilling, calm state of sociopathy. "We take the hard currency from the upper safe, we take the girl, and we leave for the air strip in Canada tonight."
"Take the girl?" Richard looked horrified. "Brooke, she’s a liability! If we cross state lines with her, it’s federal kidnapping!"
"If we leave her behind, she talks!" Brooke screamed, slamming her hand against the wine rack. "She stays with us until we get across the border, and then we make sure she can't talk to anyone ever again!"
That was all I needed.
I hit 'stop' on the video recording, instantly uploading the high-definition file directly to Evelyn’s cloud server and sending a copy straight to Detective Vance’s personal email address.
Then, I reached into my pocket, pulled out a heavy metal emergency flare I had taken from Evelyn’s kit, struck the primer, and shoved it directly through the brick slit into the wine cellar.
BRIGHT RED FIRE ERUPTED WITH A DEAFENING ROAR.
Thick, acrid crimson smoke instantly filled the wine cellar. The fire alarm system triggered immediately, screaming with high-pitched electronic shrieks as ceiling sprinklers activated, drenching the basement in cold water.
"Fire!" Richard screamed, dropping his bag and stumbling backward into the dark smoke. "The whole wall is blowing!"
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Brooke choked on the dense chemical smoke, dropping the blue binders onto the wet floor as she scrambled toward the main stairs.
I didn't wait. I threw my weight against the old wooden access panel in the brickwork, shattering the rotted frame, and burst into the smoke-filled cellar like a vengeful shadow.
