Chapter 4 - BLOOD ON THE SPREADSHEETS
The rain had stopped, replaced by a suffocating gray mist that clung to the steel canyons of Manhattan.
Within twenty minutes of Gregory’s betrayal coming to light, Roman had mobilized. We weren't sitting in a boardroom. We were tearing down the New Jersey Turnpike inside an armored SUV, flanked by two black Suburbans carrying eight heavily armed private contractors.
I sat between Roman and a rack of tactical communications gear, my laptop open on my knees, my fingers flying over the keyboard as I fought a frantic digital war at eighty miles an hour.
"He's breached the firewall on server cluster four," I reported, my voice shaking as lines of red diagnostic code cascaded down my screen. "Gregory gave them the root password Dad kept written in his safe. Vance's engineers are siphoning the transaction archives!"
Roman was on a satellite phone, his expression carved from dark granite. "Cut the fiber line at the Secaucus junction. Now. I don't care if it drops half the commercial internet in Hudson County. Kill the feed."
He snapped the phone shut and turned to me. "Can you lock them out remotely?"
"Not from here! The local server room has an air-gapped physical kill switch. Dad insisted on it so he could wipe the drives if the SEC showed up with a subpoena. If Vance's men find that server rack first, they can bypass the encryption by simply cloning the hardware!"
Roman reached into the pocket of the seat in front of him, pulled out a compact semi-automatic pistol, checked the magazine with a smooth, practiced click, and racked the slide. The metallic sound was deafening inside the sealed cabin.
I stared at the gun, my heart slamming violently against my ribs. "Are you going to shoot people over financial statements?"
Roman looked at me, his amber eyes completely devoid of hesitation. "Sadie, the world you grew up in used lawsuits and social ostracization to destroy lives. The world your father borrowed three million dollars from uses lead and quicklime. Vance doesn't want the spreadsheets to audit your father. He wants them because they link my legitimate real estate holdings to your father’s illicit funds. If he gets that proof, I spend thirty years in Leavenworth, and you disappear into a federal witness protection grave."
He reached out, his hand catching the nape of my neck, his fingers firm and warm, anchoring me in the center of the storm. "I don't lose, Sadie. And since midnight, you belong on my side of the ledger. Understand?"
A jolt of raw heat flared through the terror in my veins. No one in my life had ever stood between me and destruction. My father had used me as a human shield; my mother had looked away; my brother had sold me for an advance on an inheritance.
"I understand," I whispered.
The SUV screeched off the industrial park exit in Secaucus, tires smoking on the wet concrete. Ahead of us sat a nondescript, windowless concrete facility surrounded by razor-wire fences.
The security gate was already smashed open. Two black sedans with tinted windows sat idling in the gravel lot.
"They're inside," the driver barked.
"Marcus, take teams two and three around the loading dock," Roman commanded, his voice cold and crisp. "Secure the perimeter. Nobody leaves."
He unbuckled and reached for my wrist, pulling me toward him. "You stay behind me. You touch nothing except that server rack. You flip the switch, copy the root data to your cold drive, and you do not look at anything else. Do you copy?"
"Yes," I breathed.
The rear doors swung open into the raw November chill. Gunfire echoed from inside the warehouse—sharp, terrifying pops that sounded nothing like movies and everything like sudden death.
I flinched, my instinct to curl into a ball screaming for dominance. But Roman's hand was clamped around mine, his grip unbreakable. He pulled me through the side entrance into a maze of concrete hallways lit by buzzing fluorescent bulbs.
Smoke and the smell of ozone filled the air. Ahead, two men in tactical gear lay sprawled on the concrete floor, motionless. I looked away, bile rising in my throat, keeping my eyes glued to the broad line of Roman’s shoulders.
We reached the server room. The heavy steel door had been breached with an acetylene torch, the edges glowing a dull, molten orange.
Inside, three men were frantically pulling server blades from a humming black cabinet, loading them into reinforced flight cases. One of them turned, raising a submachine gun.
Roman didn't hesitate. He raised his weapon and fired two rapid shots. The man collapsed with a dull thud. The remaining two scrambled behind the metal racks, returning fire. Bullets chewed through the acoustic ceiling tiles, raining down white powder and sparks.
Roman shoved me down behind an overturned steel desk, shielding my body with his own. The heat radiating from his chest was scorching. I could feel the steady, terrifying rhythm of his heartbeat against my forehead.
"The green panel on rack seven!" Roman shouted over the din, firing another round down the corridor. "Go!"
I scrambled on hands and knees across the floor, ignoring the burning scrapes on my palms. I reached the base of rack seven. A heavy glass casing covered the master breaker.
I didn't have the key.
Without thinking, I grabbed a discarded steel server rail from the floor and smashed it against the tempered glass. It shattered into a thousand tiny cubes. Inside was the red mechanical lever marked PRIMARY SYSTEM PURGE.
Beside it was the USB-C diagnostic port.
I ripped my external hard drive from my cardigan pocket, jammed the connector into the port, and watched the digital transfer progress bar appear on its miniature OLED screen.
10%... 40%... 85%...
A shadow fell over me.
I looked up. Standing above me was Gregory.
My brother wasn't wearing tactical gear. He wore his expensive camel hair coat, his face pale and sweaty, his eyes wide and wild with panic. In his shaking right hand, he held a revolver.
"Sadie," he stammered, his voice cracking. "Stop the transfer. Unplug it."
"Gregory?" I stared at him in utter disbelief. "What have you done?"
"Dad was going to ruin us!" Gregory cried, the gun trembling violently in his hand, pointed directly at my chest. "He lost the firm's capital in an offshore hedge fund! Vance promised if I brought him your encryption drives, he’d pay off Dad’s debts and give me forty percent of the new development project!"
"He's using you, Greg! Look around you! People are dying!"
"I don't care!" he screamed, his voice shrill with entitled hysteria. "You were always nothing, Sadie! You sat in the basement doing bookkeeping while I carried the family name! Unplug the drive, or I swear to God I'll pull the trigger!"
The transfer bar flashed: 100% COMPLETE. EJECT SAFE.
I didn't reach for the cord. I looked my brother dead in the eye—the golden boy who had driven the sports cars I paid for, who had attended the Ivy League schools funded by the accounts I kept balanced, who had watched from the stairs as our father sold me like livestock.
"You won't shoot," I said softly, the fear draining from my voice, replaced by pure, freezing clarity. "You don't have the stomach to face the consequences of your own life."
Gregory’s finger tightened on the trigger. "Shut up—"
A deafening crack tore through the room.
Gregory screamed, dropping the gun as a bullet struck his wrist, sending the weapon spinning across the floor. He collapsed against the server cabinet, clutching his bleeding arm, weeping like an abandoned child.
Roman stepped through the clearing smoke, his gun smoking, his eyes dark as midnight. He walked past my groaning brother without even glancing down, stopping right in front of me.
He reached down, took my cold, trembling hands into his, and pulled me up from the floor.
"Did you get it?" he asked.
May you like
I held up the flashing black hard drive. "Everything. The entire empire."
Roman’s thumb wiped a streak of drywall dust from my forehead. A slow, terrifyingly beautiful smile touched his face. "Then let's go burn Thomas Miller's world to the ground."
