Chapter 4 - Four Seconds to Zero
Adrian did not run toward the front door when the red mercury timer beneath my mahogany desk blinked down to three seconds.
Instead, he wrapped both muscular arms around my waist, lifted me completely off my feet, and threw us backward behind the solid, four-inch-thick Calacatta marble waterfall island in the center of my kitchen, pinning my body safely beneath his own broad frame on the oak floorboards.
A heartbeat later, the world dissolved into a deafening roar of orange flame and concussive thunder that blew the bay windows of my downstairs study straight out into the street and rained pulverized plaster and splintered mahogany across the kitchen ceiling.
Through the ringing in my ears and the blinding haze of white drywall dust, I felt Adrian’s chest rise and fall hard against my back as he shielded my head from a falling chandelier with his left forearm.
When the secondary debris stopped falling ten seconds later and Adrian rolled onto his side to pull me into a sitting position, his dark eyes swept frantically over my face and throat as he demanded to know if I was hurt.
I shook my head dizzily, coughing against the acrid smoke, before gasping aloud when I saw a four-inch shard of leaded window glass buried deep in the muscle of his left forearm, soaking his white dress cuff in bright crimson blood.
The ruthless billionaire barely glanced at the wound as he wrenched the glass shard out of his arm and wrapped his pocket square tightly around the laceration while Marcus Vance and his guards kicked open the rear patio door with fire extinguishers in hand.
Looking past the edge of the marble island at the smoking crater where my home office and wall safe used to be, Marcus cursed grimly and said that whoever Arthur Whitmore had hired to plant that charge had just incinerated every physical ledger and backup drive in the house.
I stood up slowly on shaking legs, brushed the white plaster dust off the hips of my charcoal dress, and unclasped the modest, scratched stainless-steel wristwatch I had worn on my left wrist every single day for five years.
Adrian frowned slightly as I popped off the hollow titanium bezel ring behind the watch face with my thumbnail and held up a microscopic, military-grade two-terabyte flash wafer no bigger than a fingernail.
I looked up at Adrian and told him calmly that after spending seven years cleaning up behind a chronic liar like Evan Hale, I would never be stupid enough to keep my real leverage inside a wall safe that a man with a crowbar could open—because I had left decoy tax files in that safe while keeping the complete forensic wire map of Hale Holdings and Whitmore Bank right against my pulse.
For three seconds, Adrian simply stared at me in the smoke-filled kitchen, and then a slow, breathtaking smile of pure admiration crossed his scarred face as he leaned down and kissed my forehead, murmuring that I was without question the most dangerous woman in Detroit.
Ten minutes later, sitting inside the reinforced mobile command compartment of Adrian’s backup SUV as we sped toward his private riverside estate in Grosse Pointe, I slotted the micro-wafer into his satellite-linked decryption console while a private paramedic stitched Adrian’s forearm without anesthetic.
As the master shadow ledger of Arthur Whitmore’s private banking syndicate decrypted across the dual monitors, I traced the forty-million-dollar Rotterdam credit line back past Whitmore’s bank in Detroit, past a clearinghouse shell in Zurich, and straight into the private offshore sovereign account that had actually funded the C-4 explosives and paid for the hit on my townhouse.
I expected to see the name of an Eastern European cartel boss or a corrupt Chicago politician at the top of the authorization registry.
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Instead, as the final biometric signature and passport dossier materialized on the screen, Adrian’s hand went rigid against the leather armrest and the paramedic froze mid-stitch.
The mastermind who had secretly bankrolled Arthur Whitmore, ordered Evan Hale to force my signature onto the Pier Nine terrorist manifest, and hired the demolition team to blow me to pieces ten minutes ago was none other than Adrian’s thirty-four-year-old half-brother and Chief Operating Officer, Julian Bellmont—and according to the live GPS tracker flashing at the bottom of the screen, Julian had just used his executive override key to enter the federal detention floor in downtown Detroit where Evan and Paige were being held.
