Chapter 6 - The Revelation
The tires screeched as Elias whipped the sedan around a sharp corner, blending into the heavy city traffic to lose any potential pursuers. I sat in the passenger seat, my chest heaving, rain dripping from my black wig. I pulled off the wig with shaking hands, tossing it into the backseat, and let my real hair tumble down.
"Did you get it?" Elias asked, his eyes darting between the road and the rearview mirror.
I reached into my clutch and pulled out the crumpled paper. I flattened it against the dashboard. There, at the bottom of the page, was my father's signature. It was shaky, an echo of the powerful man he used to be, but it was legally binding.
"I got it," I whispered, a wave of profound relief crashing over me.
"Good. Now the real work begins," Elias said, his voice tight with adrenaline. "That signature makes me his legal proxy. But before Celeste and Victor realize what we're doing, we need to access the main server at your father's corporate headquarters. We have to download the raw financial ledgers before Sloane wipes the system clean."
"Tonight?" I asked, wiping smeared makeup from under my eyes.
"Right now," Elias confirmed, steering the car toward the financial district. "Sloane knows you were at the gala. He knows you're planning something. By tomorrow morning, that server will be a burnt-out shell. It's now or never."
The corporate headquarters of my father's company was a towering glass monolith that dominated the skyline. At this hour, it was mostly dark, save for the security desk in the lobby and the glowing lights of the server floor on the forty-second level.
Elias parked a block away in a shadowy parking structure. From the trunk, he produced a briefcase containing a high-speed data extraction drive and a modified keycard. "I borrowed this from a disgruntled IT manager your stepmother fired last month," he explained, swiping the card through a side entrance reader. The light blinked green.
We slipped into the silent, cavernous building. The silence was eerie, a stark contrast to the bustling energy of the daytime. We bypassed the main elevators, opting for the service elevator that required an override code Elias punched in with practiced ease. The ride up to the forty-second floor felt like an eternity, the mechanical hum of the elevator amplifying the frantic beating of my heart.
When the doors opened, we stepped into the server room—a vast, chilly space filled with towering racks of blinking lights. Elias moved quickly to the central terminal, plugging in his extraction drive. He unfurled the document with my father's signature, scanned it into the system's legal override portal, and typed furiously.
"Come on, come on," he muttered. A green progress bar appeared on the screen. Downloading Encrypted Ledgers.
As the files transferred, a folder on the desktop caught my eye. It was labeled simply: Medical.
"Elias, open that," I pointed at the screen.
He hesitated, then clicked the folder. A series of private medical reports and pharmacy invoices flooded the screen. I scanned the text, my blood running cold. It wasn't dementia. The documents detailed heavy, constant prescriptions for a powerful, unapproved neuro-sedative, ordered directly by a private doctor on Victor Sloane's payroll.
They weren't just stealing his money. They were chemically erasing his mind to maintain control. They were slowly killing my father.
A tear slipped down my cheek, hot and full of rage. "Print it," I ordered, my voice trembling with a fury I had never known. "Print everything."
"Data extraction at ninety percent," Elias said, his eyes fixed on the screen.
Suddenly, the lights in the server room flickered and died. The emergency red backup lights bathed the room in a sinister, bloody glow. The electronic locks on the main doors clicked shut with a heavy, final sound.
A voice echoed through the room's intercom system, smooth, arrogant, and terrifyingly calm.
May you like
"Did you really think I wouldn't have alerts set on the mainframe, little bird?" Victor Sloane's voice purred through the speakers. "You've made a terrible mistake coming here."
The progress bar hit ninety-nine percent, and the heavy doors to the server room began to violently shake as someone outside tried to force them open.
