The visitation room at Red Creek County Jail was unusually quiet that afternoon. The walls were painted a dull gray, the fluorescent lights above buzzed softly, and the thick glass partitions separated inmates from their visitors.

The Red Creek County Courthouse was a towering monolith of gray limestone and Corinthian columns, built to project an illusion of absolute justice. For Noah, it was enemy territory.

It had been four months since Marissa’s incarceration. The trial had been a lightning-fast sham; court-appointed counsel had barely mounted a defense, and the jury had returned a guilty verdict in under two hours. Marissa was now serving a ten-year sentence at the state correctional facility three hours away.

Noah hadn't visited her in two months. Not because he loved her any less, but because he was busy executing phase one of his plan.

Clutching a forged visitor’s pass and wearing an oversized thrift-store jacket that made him look like a homeless urchin, nine-year-old Noah slipped through the side employee entrance of the municipal records building attached to the courthouse.

The janitor’s closet door had been left propped open by a distracted worker. Noah ducked inside, holding his breath as footsteps echoed down the tiled hallway. When the sound faded, he slipped out into the subterranean archives.

Row upon row of steel shelving stretched into the dim fluorescent haze, holding decades of municipal records, property deeds, and financial audits.

Noah’s heart hammered against his ribs. He knew from his late-night research that the Red Creek Trust Fund audits from the past five years were stored in Section 14, Box 882.

He moved quickly between the towering shelves, his small sneakers squeaking softly on the concrete floor.

Section 12... Section 13... Section 14.

There it was. Box 882.

It was sitting on a high shelf, just out of reach. Noah gritted his teeth, dragged a heavy metal step stool across the floor, climbed up on it, and pulled the cardboard box down. It landed with a heavy thump on the floor, kicking up a cloud of dust that made him cough.

He dropped to his knees, ripping open the taped lid.

Inside were hundreds of pages of financial logs, wire transfers, and internal bank memos. He didn't understand all of it, but he knew what he was looking for: the original ledger entries for the housing grant accounts.

He flipped through the pages frantically under the harsh light of a single overhead bulb.

Page after page showed standard transactions—until he hit page 47.

There, stamped in red ink, was a transfer order of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But the destination account wasn't the offshore shell company the prosecution claimed belonged to Marissa. It was an account registered under Sterling Holdings LLC.

Victor Sterling’s personal holding company.

Noah’s hands began to shake violently. He pulled a small disposable camera out of his pocket—a cheap plastic camera he had stolen from a pharmacy two weeks ago—and began snapping pictures of the documents as fast as he could. Flash. Click. Turn page. Flash. Click.

Suddenly, the heavy metal door at the end of the archive hallway banged open.

“Hey! Who’s down there?” a gruff security voice barked.

Panic surged through Noah’s veins. He shoved the documents back into the box, dropped the camera into his coat pocket, and scrambled behind a massive stack of deed ledgers just as a flashlight beam swept across the aisle.

Footsteps crunched closer. Closer.